U.S. science must innovate or die, National Academy of Sciences president says
The past year has been “filled with turmoil” for science, National Academy of Sciences president Marcia McNutt said during her State of the Science address
By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron
The past year has been “filled with turmoil” in science policy, National Academy of Sciences (NAS) president Marcia McNutt said on Tuesday during the annual State of the Science address in Washington, D.C.
McNutt cited problems such as “uncertainty” over federal support for science, “abrupt downsizing” of science agencies, a mass exodus of federal employees and the fact that the world’s top scientific minds are leaving the U.S.
“We always were the country where STEM talent came to us,” McNutt said, referring to science, technology, engineering and math fields. “Now we are exporting our science talent elsewhere.” After about 10 years as president of NAS, McNutt plans to step down on June 30.
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Since President Donald Trump took office last year, U.S. science has been a target for funding cuts, firings and intense regulatory scrutiny . By one estimate, around 100,000 federal employees at scientific agencies have either been fired or left public office in his second term. The administration has also cut nearly 8,000 scientific grants, mostly from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, according to a Nature analysis published in January (some grants have since been reinstated by the courts).
And just last week, as Scientific American reported , the administration published a proposal to give political appointees final say on grant funding instead of researchers, overturning a decades-long precedent. “Now, what co…
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Neanderthals had some wild stuff in their toolkits.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research won't be losing its supercomputer.
In a first, scientists transplanted both a pig liver and kidneys into a person who was brain-dead
The transplanted pig organs functioned for 36 hours before showing signs of rejection
A 53-year-old clinically dead man has become the first person to receive two kidneys and a whole liver from a genetically modified pig. The man’s organ function was sustained for almost five days with consent from his family, and there were no signs that the organs were being rejected in the first 24 hours, according to a study published in Med today.
Most procedures in which a pig organ is transplanted into a person — known as xenotransplantation — involve only a single organ. A small number of people have received pig organs, including hearts, kidneys , partial livers and lungs , and clinical trials in living people are under way in the United States and China. Until now, only parts of a pig liver have been transplanted into a person, says clinician-scientist Xuyong Sun, who led the latest procedure, at the Second Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University in Nanning, China.
Transplanting pig kidneys and a liver in the same procedure is also unique, says Leonardo Riella, a physician-scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who in 2024 led the team that first transplanted a pig kidney into a living person. Transferring multiple organs is more complex than moving one; procedures take longer, increasing the risk of complications, and people who need multiple transplants are often more seriously ill, he adds.
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The study shows that multi-organ xenotransplants are possible, says Wayne Hawthorne, a surgeon and transplant researcher at the University of Sydney in Australia.
Multi-organ transplants are already performed with…
Swapping materials in its Majorana 2 chip boosted the effectiveness of quantum bits that rely on the math of topology to reduce errors, Microsoft says.
Microsoft’s new quantum computer chip has a fundamental problem
Microsoft’s announcement of a new quantum computing breakthrough with its Majorana 2 chip continues a trend of bold claims followed by scant evidence
Microsoft claimed today that it has improved its quantum technology by an extraordinary factor. Outside experts say it doesn’t even work and never has.
The company has named its latest quantum chip Majorana 2 , for the theoretical quasiparticle it aims to use as the basis for a new “topological” approach to quantum computing . Chilled to ultracold temperatures in superconducting wires, electrons may be coaxed to act collectively—as so-called Majorana quasiparticles —in a manner that theoretically makes them more resistant to the physical “noise” that causes computational errors in other quantum systems.
Similar to braiding weak fibers together to make a strong rope, Microsoft’s approach seeks to create topological quantum bits, or qubits , by manipulating multiple Majorana quasiparticles on one device. In principle, this quantum computing method could scale up better than others, with Microsoft claiming it could someday squeeze millions of qubits onto a single chip. That could give the company a significant advantage in the race to build a quantum device that outpaces any machine in existence at certain problems .
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“This is a very exciting era that we’re in,” said Jason Zander, executive vice president leading Microsoft’s Quantum team, during a press briefing before the public announcement. “We’re at the start of a new chapter.”
But the company has a mixed track record when it comes to such claims. In 2021 Microsoft retracted a high-profile Nature paper after outside experts pointed out that the study’s data …
<p><img width="1024" height="576" src="https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/magnetfalt-rymden-1024x576.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Exoplanet med magnetfält och en glödande stjärna." decoding="async" fetchpriority="high" srcset="https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/magnetfalt-rymden-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/magnetfalt-rymden-300x169.jpg 300w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/magnetfalt-rymden-768x432.jpg 768w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/magnetfalt-rymden-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/magnetfalt-rymden-850x478.jpg 850w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/magnetfalt-rymden-310x174.jpg 310w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/magnetfalt-rymden-1102x620.jpg 1102w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/magnetfalt-rymden.jpg 1920w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></p>
<p>Magnetfält är inget fenomen som bara existerar i vårt solsystem. En färsk studie visar att avlägsna exoplaneter bär tydliga spår av magnetism – något som tidigare inte varit känt. Resultaten öppnar för nya sätt att studera främmande världar och hitta beboeliga planeter.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://forskning.se/2026/06/02/kosmiska-kastvindar-avslojar-mystiska-magnetfalt/">Kosmiska kastvindar avslöjar mystiska magnetfält</a> appeared first on <a href="https://forskning.se">forskning.se</a>.</p>
These sounds could be used to track the health of populations of the endangered Atlantic sturgeon
By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron
Atlantic sturgeon in the Hudson River in New York State generate low-frequency “thunder” sounds while mating, according to recent research . The findings could be used to help study declining populations of the endangered fish species.
Atlantic sturgeon are massive fish —an individual of the species can grow to about the same length as a Volkswagen Beetle and can weigh more than a parlor a grand piano. And these large animals apparently generate some rather grumbly mating events.
“It’s almost that you feel it more than you hear it,” said Maija Niemistö, a co-author of the study and a researcher at Cornell University’s New York State Water Resources Institute, in a statement .
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During spawning—or mating—a female sturgeon releases as many as two million eggs into the water, while males release milt, or fluid containing sperm. Scientists recorded “biological sounds” during these events in the Hudson, hearing what they describe as “thunders.” These are the first recordings of Atlantic sturgeon’s noisy mating, according to the authors—lake sturgeon, a separate species of fish, are known to make similar “thunder” sounds during spawning.
It’s unclear whether the sounds may be a form of sturgeon-to-sturgeon communication or simply the by-product of mating activity, the authors note. In hatcheries, male Atlantic sturgeon have been observed to “thrash against” females during the spawning process, the authors write.
This thrashing—and possibly the jiggling of the sturgeon’s swim bladder—could be generating the rumbling sounds, says Rebecca Cohen, lead author of the study and a postdo…
To chart how our brains change over the course of our lives, neuroscientists have focused largely on beginnings and endings: the rapid development and pruning of neural connections in childhood and adolescence, and the degeneration associated with old age. “We kind of skipped over middle age,” says Sebastian Dohm-Hansen , a bioinformatician at University College Cork in Ireland.
There are good reasons for that, not least that changes in brain structure and function are easier to spot with neuroimaging when they are at their most extreme. In the case of cognitive decline and dementia, “a lot of what we care about presents most dramatically after the age of 60”, says Dohm-Hansen.
But over the past few years, researchers have started to look more closely at the middle-aged brain, identifying a series of subtle but significant changes between the ages of 40 and 65 that mark it out as a vital time to identify problems that won’t manifest until later in life.
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“Think of midlife as the top of an inverted U-curve,” says Ahmad Hariri , a professor of neuroscience at Duke University in North Carolina. You spend the earlier decades on the upward slope, developing and refining your brain. You’ll likely spend decades on the downward slope, slowly losing those gains. “Targeting midlife is like extending that level section at the top of the curve, to delay the downward trajectory.”
Among the most important of these midlife changes, according to a 2024 review by Dohm-Hansen and his colleagues, are changes in connectivity – how well neurons send signals over long distances and how the brain organises its processing across regions. This connectivity peaks in middle age, then rapidly declines.
Your science-backed guide to the easy habits that will help you sleep well, stress less, eat smarter and age better.
The extent of the decline c…
Our understanding of the electromagnetic spectrum goes back to Isaac Newton, but astronomers are still finding new ways to employ it. Astrophysicist Emma Chapman explores how much these invisible waves can reveal to us about the cosmos – and whether they might show us that we’re not alone
<p><img width="1024" height="576" src="https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/Tagellav-1024x576.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Bild på tagellav som är brunfärgad och snirklar sig runt en gren." decoding="async" fetchpriority="high" srcset="https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/Tagellav-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/Tagellav-300x169.jpg 300w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/Tagellav-768x432.jpg 768w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/Tagellav-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/Tagellav-850x478.jpg 850w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/Tagellav-310x174.jpg 310w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/Tagellav-1102x620.jpg 1102w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/Tagellav.jpg 1920w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></p>
<p>Hänglavar spelar en viktig roll i barrskogarnas ekosystem. De ger föda, livsmiljöer och bomaterial åt däggdjur, fåglar, insekter och spindlar. – De är särskilt viktiga för renskötseln och kan vara avgörande för renens överlevnad på vintern när marklavar är otillgängliga. Därför är kunskap om hur miljöfaktorer reglerar mängden hänglavar viktig för att utforma mer skonsamma […]</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://forskning.se/2026/06/02/hyggesfritt-skogsbruk-gynnar-hanglavar/">Hyggesfritt skogsbruk gynnar hänglavar</a> appeared first on <a href="https://forskning.se">forskning.se</a>.</p>
Trump’s new AI executive order drastically shifts the administration’s stance on the tech
This order asks artificial intelligence companies to give the U.S. government up to 30 days to assess frontier models before they are released
On Tuesday President Donald Trump issued an executive order that seeks to give the U.S. government more oversight of “frontier” artificial intelligence models—signaling a fundamental shift from the administration’s previous hands-off approach to the technology.
The order asks technology companies to voluntarily share new AI models with the government for up to 30 days before releasing the models more widely. It also asks companies to collaborate with the administration to “select trusted partners” that will gain early access to the models to “promote secure innovation and strengthen the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure .”
The order also directs leadership of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, as well as the Office of the National Cyber Director, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security to work with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to develop an “AI cybersecurity clearinghouse,” which will collaborate with the tech industry and infrastructure operators such as power companies and hospital administrators to identify and fix AI software vulnerabilities.
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The order’s broad call to strengthen U.S. resilience to cyberthreats and safeguard against potential rogue AI actors represents a major shift in the Trump administration’s approach, which had been more laissez-faire compared with the previous Biden administration’s push to make the AI industry more accountable and more geared toward safety, also on a voluntary …
Longevity startup NewLimit plans to launch its first clinical trial of a liver medicine after raising a staggering $435 million in new funding.
This is a month to look out for some powerful new books, with authors taking on challenges of all sorts and imagining whole new worlds. There are fresh ways to think about a cancer diagnosis, a book tackling the real inner world of hormones, in which we are all hormonal all the time, plus a major re-envisioning of the natural world where we abandon the shallows of competition for the depth and intricacies of connection and togetherness. Welcome to the symbiocene.
It’s quite hard going to get an up-to-date grip on human evolution, even for the best-briefed adult, so a book with sophisticated text and excellent illustrations and diagrams can only be a good thing. Especially if it is curated and edited by Alice Roberts, biological anthropologist, palaeopathologist, broadcaster – and professor of public engagement in science at the University of Birmingham, UK. She worked with a generous-sized international team of experts in many fields of human evolution, including archaeology, palaeontology, anthropology and cognitive science. Each chapter is devoted to the evolution of a part of the body, including hands, lungs and the digestive system, building a complex picture of our origins and nature. There are so many questions to address: when did we invent clothes? Why are our babies altricial (underdeveloped and highly dependent at birth)? What happened to the other modern humans? Are we the only animals to have become quite so self-aware? Just the kind of book to take on a very long trip.
For Saira Hameed, we are all hormonal, all of the time – it’s not colloquial shorthand for feeling tired, moody, puffy or all three. But then, as a consultant endocrinologist, she knows that the tiny hypothalamus (“an implausible leader of the body’s hormones”, as she calls it) controls the myriad processes that are all about everyday life and that we barely notice when they work: appetite, body weight, thirst, stress, sleep, growth, metabolism, puberty, reproduction and sex drive. T…
Trump administration takes aim at crucial ocean monitoring network
The Ocean Observatories Initiative has been collecting data on physical, chemical, geological and biological conditions in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans for the past decade
The Trump administration is targeting one of the world’s most trusted sources of climate and oceanic data—the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI). According to the New York Times , ships will be dispatched this month to remove the more than 900 deep-sea instruments that comprise the network, which, for the past decade, has collected crucial data on physical, chemical, geological and biological conditions from all layers of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans on a continuous basis.
In a statement dated May 21, the OOI confirmed that the National Science Foundation (NSF) had begun a “descoping” process, including removing all in-water infrastructure from four of the OOI’s five deployed arrays. “This plan includes the removal of all in-water infrastructure from the Irminger Sea, Station Papa, Endurance and Pioneer Arrays, subject to ship scheduling and other operational constraints,” the OOI said in the statement. This covers instruments stationed in the Pacific, as well as others in the waters off the U.S. Atlantic coast and Greenland and Iceland. The initiative was originally meant to run for 25 years.
In a statement, an NSF spokesperson said the intention was not to cancel the OOI but to transition to a “nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies, as well as smart lifecycle management within its research infrastructure portfolio.”
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“NSF remains committed to ocean science and will continue working with the scientific community on …
There are sound engineering reasons to use the same approach SpaceX uses with the Falcon 9
From dementia to heart attacks, hearing loss has been linked to a wide range of effects across the body, and the condition is on the rise. Fortunately, we're learning how best to safeguard this crucial sense and how we might be able to reverse the damage
Deep below our feet, manganese may exist in a form we have never seen before, and this underground source of the metal could have played a role in the story of how Earth got its oxygen.
Until about 2 billion years ago, Earth’s atmosphere barely contained any oxygen. Then came the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE) when oxygen produced by photosynthesising microbes started to accumulate, spurring development of more diverse forms of life and changing the planet.
Read more Record-breaking drill core reaches 1.2 kilometres into Earth's mantle
Record-breaking drill core reaches 1.2 kilometres into Earth's mantle
Manganese is thought to have been a crucial component in an early version of photosynthesis, before the evolution of the oxygen-producing pathway that is widespread today. In Earth’s crust, manganese is commonly found in oxygen-containing ores, which started to accumulate at around the same time as the GOE.
According to Jingming Shi at Jiangsu Normal University in China, some of this ore could have come from a hitherto unknown manganese compound deep underground, hiding in Earth’s mantle.
Many manganese oxides are known to exist at standard pressure, but Shi and his colleagues set out to explore which of them may be stable at extreme pressures and temperatures deep inside our planet. They used a computer simulation to explore how thousands of different arrangements of manganese and oxygen atoms would behave at pressures up to 1.5 million times the atmospheric pressure, comparable to conditions about 2900 kilometres under Earth’s surface.
The latest on what’s new in science and why it matters each day.
This led them to several new compounds, including one that has four manganese atoms for every oxygen atom, which is unusually rich in the metal. “We did not necessarily expect such a manganese-rich oxide to be stable over such a wide pressure range. That was the most interesting and unexpected finding,” says Shi.
While the team doesn’t have direct evidence t…
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A new phase of the natural El Niño weather pattern could begin in a matter of weeks, the UN has warned, boosting temperatures on a planet already under strain from climate change.
Lilly gave hospitals participating in a federal drug discount program five days to submit claims data or it will stop the price breaks
<p>Förra veckan förstördes en raket i en spektakulär explosion i ett test inför uppskjutningen som var planerad till den 4 juni, och startplattan demolerades. Raketen …</p>
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Togetherness Rowan Hooper ( Fern Press , UK, out 4th June; Knopf , US, out 18th August)
The best books are those that give you a new perspective, but Togetherness by my colleague Rowan Hooper has given me something more than that – not just a new view, but a new way of seeing. In essence a book about symbiosis, Togetherness zooms from the inner workings of our cells all the way out to how our planet functions as a whole and back in again, revealing how biological cooperation underpins all life – and why Western science has largely failed to notice this for centuries.
Symbiosis is the kind of concept you learn at school, often with a too-neat-to-be-true definition and a few quirky illustrative examples – coral, say, or lichen. Both feature in Togetherness (plus plenty of extraordinary cases you won’t be familiar with), but Rowan makes it abundantly clear that symbiosis isn’t a freak occurrence confined to a few classic cases: it’s a rule of nature, occurring time and time again and everywhere you care to look.
How a radical new view of life could reveal its origin – and aliens We've been looking at nature the wrong way, argues Rowan Hooper. If we stop focusing on the individual, we get a whole new picture of how life on Earth – and elsewhere – may have begun
How a radical new view of life could reveal its origin – and aliens
We've been looking at nature the wrong way, argues Rowan Hooper. If we stop focusing on the individual, we get a whole new picture of how life on Earth – and elsewhere – may have begun
Having demonstrated this, he then makes his passionate argument for how this revelation requires us to re-examine everything we know about the natural world. He traces our understanding of evolution through history, and how Charles Darwin’s dazzling fundamental insights on competition and survival have an overlooked counterpart in the tendency of unrelated living things to come together. Rowan – as big a fan of Darwin as I’ve ever met – treads the line car…
Medicaid work requirements, fast-tracked funding for experimental Ebola vaccines, and more health news from Morning Rounds
<p>Three studies add to evidence that jabs could be part of cancer-fighting toolkit to cut risk of developing or dying from disease</p><p>Weight-loss drugs can cut the risk of developing or dying from cancer by 30%, doctors have said.</p><p>Millions of people already use the drugs to treat obesity. Now a series of studies presented at the world’s largest oncology conference suggest the drugs could play a role in preventing and treating cancer.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jun/02/weight-loss-drugs-cut-cancer-risk-studies">Continue reading...</a>