Vultures are among the most misunderstood animals on Earth — and among the most important. They are nature's sanitation service: the birds that turn a carcass into clean ground, removing bacteria and pathogens before they get a chance to spread. Their work is worth billions and, as the collapse of vultures in India showed, losing them can cost human lives. Yet across much of the world, these scavengers are quietly vanishing.
Your metabolism is the sum of the biochemical processes by which your body turns food into energy. The common belief that slim people automatically have a "faster" burn than people with overweight is a myth: a heavier body needs more energy to function and has an absolutely higher resting calorie expenditure. Weight regulation comes down to total energy balance. So to understand how to influence what you burn, you first need to know what your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) is made of.
In Singapore, researchers have switched on a data center that runs on a different kind of silicon substitute: living human brain cells. The prototype, built at the NUS Life Sciences Institute by the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine (NUS Medicine) together with global data center developer and operator DayOne and Melbourne-based biological computing startup Cortical Labs, packs roughly 16 million living human neurons into a single server rack — the world's first independently operated biologically integrated rack.
When a gull dive-bombs your picnic, paleontologist Steve Brusatte sees more than a bird thief: he sees a small dinosaur with unmistakable velociraptor attitude. In this New Scientist interview, the author of the new book The Story of Birds makes a bold claim — birds aren't just descended from dinosaurs, they are dinosaurs, the only branch that survived the asteroid.
On July 30, 2026, IBM and researchers from the University of Chicago announced a quantum computation that meets the fundamental criteria for quantum advantage: a task beyond the practical reach of the best known classical methods, completed in about fifteen minutes. Just as important, the team found a way to verify how reliable the result actually was — addressing the long-standing problem that has made quantum advantage claims so hard to trust.
For fifty years the tokamak — the classic donut-shaped reactor — has dominated fusion research. Now a Munich startup called Proxima Fusion, spun out of the Max Planck Institute and freshly funded with €411 million including checks from Google and energy giant RWE, is betting everything on the shape the field walked away from half a century ago: the stellarator, a twisted "donut" so absurdly complicated it was long believed impossible to build. This is the story of why fusion is so hard, why the tokamak has a fatal flaw, and how Europe's most ambitious energy bet plans to build the first stellarator power plant in history.