What We're Reading

Nanofluidics could be used to purify water, generate energy and build nanoscale machines. But when water flows through a carbon nanotube, classical fluid mechanics breaks down, leading to puzzling experimental findings that researchers have attributed to an effect called “quantum friction.”

For astrophysicist David Spergel, teaching at a summer school about data science in August 2023 in Ukraine was a “surreal” experience. At times, utterly normal—smart students and collegial dinners in the charming cobblestoned city of Lviv. But punctuated by sirens and cellphone alerts warning of Russian missile attacks that compelled attendees to seek refuge in bomb shelters. Spergel, president of the Simons Foundation, started to think there had to be something more the West could do to aid his Ukrainian colleagues.

Autism exists on a spectrum because it is an inherently diverse condition. It manifests everywhere, paying little mind to culture, gender, race, religion or family income. Within this magnificent diversity there is only one constant: every person with autism deserves access to dignified care and support to help them thrive.

It’s time to welcome a new type of cell to the club of living things that can harvest nitrogen from the atmosphere. Until now, the only lifeforms thought to pull nitrogen from the air and turn it into a biologically useful form were bacteria and archaea. But the discovery of a special ammonia factory inside a single-celled ocean alga adds eukaryotes — organisms with membrane-bound structures called organelles — to the list, researchers report in the April 12 Science.

It’s now thought that they could illuminate fundamental questions in physics, settle questions about Einstein’s theories, and even help explain the universe.

Cosmologists are preparing to cast their sharpest-ever eyes on the early Universe. From an altitude of 5,300 metres on Cerro Toco, in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert, the Simons Observatory will map the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — sometimes called the afterglow of the Big Bang — with a sensitivity up to ten times greater than that of the previous gold standard, Europe’s Planck space probe.

While the Top500 list ranks the 500 biggest high-performance computers (HPCs) in the world, its cousin the Green500 re-ranks the same 500 supercomputers according to their energy efficiency. For the last three iterations of the list, Henri — a small supercomputer operated by the Flatiron Institute in New York—has been named the world’s most energy efficient high-performance computer.

People have long scratched their heads trying to understand how life ever got going after the formation of Earth billions of years ago. Now, chemists have partly unlocked the recipe by creating a complex compound essential to all life — in a lab.

Astronomers have detected an enormous gamma-ray bubble that could be a source of the Milky Way’s most powerful cosmic rays — high-energy particles that rain down on Earth from space.

Five patients who got tainted growth hormone injections developed early Alzheimer’s decades later.