Briefing

To prevent Salmonella food poisoning, refrigerate your eggs, cook them well, never eat them raw and clean, clean, clean

Here’s the surprising math at the heart of auction theory

During recent protests in Los Angeles, fires triggered “thermal runaway” in several Waymo robotaxis’ lithium-ion battery packs. The phenomenon sent temperatures past 1,000 degrees Celsius, vaporized much of the cars and spewed lung-searing hydrogen fluoride

In recent years COVID shots joined flu shots as an annual offering at most neighborhood pharmacies. But the current administration has thrown that into uncertainty

The Trump administration is targeting still more federal science funding, this time more than $30 billion at the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation and other agencies

Physicists at the University of Oxford have set a new global benchmark for the accuracy of controlling a single quantum bit, achieving the lowest-ever error rate for a quantum logic operation–just 0.000015%, or one error in 6.7 million operations. This record-breaking result represents nearly an order of magnitude improvement over the previous benchmark, set by the same research group a decade ago.

Some volcanoes erupt with little to no warning, posing serious risks to nearby communities and air traffic. A study of Alaska’s Veniaminof volcano reveals how specific internal conditions like slow magma flow and warm chamber walls can create these so-called “stealthy eruptions.”

A prehistoric digestive time capsule has been unearthed in Australia: plant fossils found inside a sauropod dinosaur offer the first definitive glimpse into what these giant creatures actually ate. The remarkably preserved gut contents reveal that sauropods were massive, indiscriminate plant-eaters who swallowed leaves, conifer shoots, and even flowering plants without chewing relying on their gut microbes to break it all down.

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have captured breathtakingly detailed images of two giant exoplanets orbiting a distant sun-like star. These observations revealed sand-like silicate clouds in one planet s atmosphere and an unexpected disk around another that may be forming moons something previously seen only in much younger systems. These snapshots offer a rare chance to witness planet formation in real time, giving clues about how worlds like Jupiter and even our own solar system came to be.

Scientists in Japan have discovered that a natural compound found in a type of ginger called kencur can throw cancer cells into disarray by disrupting how they generate energy. While healthy cells use oxygen to make energy efficiently, cancer cells often rely on a backup method. This ginger-derived molecule doesn t attack that method directly it shuts down the cells’ fat-making machinery instead, which surprisingly causes the cells to ramp up their backup system even more. The finding opens new doors in the fight against cancer, showing how natural substances might help target cancer s hidden energy tricks.