What We're Reading

Combining fossil and geochemical analysis, researchers showed that eukaryotic cells were already complex and aerobic 1.7 billion years ago, pushing back the dawn of eukaryogenesis.

Patients with exceedingly rare genetic diseases fall through the cracks of the medical system. This doctor is designing drugs for them, one at a time.

On April 19, Humanities in Medicine, the Duke Program in Literature, the DeWitt Wallace Center, Duke English and Duke’s Program in Education hosted “Storytelling Through Science Journalism,” a speaker event featuring Samir Patel (Pratt ‘97), the editor-and-chief of Quanta Magazine. The talk was an interesting exploration of the intersection of journalism, science and the humanities, as well as a look at the future of science journalism.

Snapshot measurements of cold-atom gases reveal hidden spin correlations that could force an update of some superconductivity theories.

The Hubble Arp Galaxy Survey turned the talents of the Hubble Space Telescope toward 216 targets in the Arp and Arp–Madore catalogs. These catalogs contain galaxies that are visibly out of equilibrium, either caught in the middle of an interaction with another galaxy, sporting strange structures, or illuminated by brilliant starbursts.

With warmer ocean temperatures, the composition of marine plankton could shift from protein-rich to carb-heavy, a new study suggests.

A new study reveals that the geometry of brain activity patterns determines how well knowledge transfers to new situations, and presents a single mathematical formula that captures this in both brains and AI systems.

A new preprint shows that a type of particle interaction many physicists expected would not occur can in fact arise under specific conditions. The work focuses on gluons, the particles that carry the strong nuclear force.

New research examines a newly characterized beetle species, Sceptobius, that lives in a symbiotic relationship with ant colonies, and finds that Sceptobius infiltrates ant colonies by developing an invisibility cloak — silencing its own pheromones in order to steal and mask themselves with ant pheromones.

A group of ocean bacteria long considered perfectly adapted to life in nutrient-poor waters may be more vulnerable to environmental change than scientists realized.