If you have health insurance and need a therapist or psychiatrist, the first step is usually the same: open your plan's directory and start calling the names listed as in-network. Researchers at Ohio State University wanted to know how well that actually works. So they did it themselves, thousands of times, posing as patients with commercial insurance in five US states. Most of the calls went nowhere.

Music is supposed to be where people put their feelings: heartbreak, longing, joy, the people they love. A team at Michigan State University wanted to see whether that is still true. With the help of about 30 research assistants, they collected the lyrics of 38,467 songs by 230 artists, from Willie Nelson to Miles Davis, spanning 1947 to 2024, and measured the language in every one. The feelings were fading. One was not.

About 2 million years ago, a cave in what is now South Africa's Cradle of Humankind collected the bones of two very different kinds of early human. One had a big brain and small teeth. The other had massive jaws built for grinding tough plants. Many of the fossils dug out of that cave between 1992 and 2019 were never fully described. Researchers have now gone back to 18 of them, and the count tells a story nobody would have bet on.

Scientists have made a breakthrough toward the mind-bending goal of creating computers made of brains by demonstrating that human neural tissue can classify letters of the Braille alphabet, according to a study published on Friday in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence.  

A team transmitted electrical signals corresponding to Braille letters to human brain organoids, which are living neural tissues derived from stem cells.

The results revealed that a single organoid, consisting of about 10,000 neurons, could classify the letters with about 61 percent accuracy, while teams of three organoids reached 83 percent accuracy.

“The human brain can perform incredibly complex information processing while consuming relatively little energy, and artificial neural networks were originally inspired by biological nervous systems,” said Tianyi Liu, a PhD candidate at Bristol University who led the new study, in an email to 404 Media.

“If we've been trying to imitate biological neural networks all along, why not try using real biological neural networks directly?” she continued.

“What kind of information processing capabilities might these tiny neural organoids have? Could they show some form of learning or adaptation? These are all questions we're very interested in.”

Statins are among the most prescribed drugs in the world, taken by millions of people for one reason: to lower cholesterol. But for years, lab studies have hinted that they might also protect nerve cells from dying, including the ones that connect the eye to the brain. US researchers decided to check that in real patients, using medical records from a global database of 165 million people. They focused on glaucoma, the eye disease that slowly and silently steals sight.

Some quantum calculations need special “magic states,” and each one can be used only once, so a machine has to keep producing fresh ones. Google’s technique, called magic state cultivation, works like a filter: it runs a noisy state through checks, discards the ones that fail, and keeps cleaner ones, reaching 99.99% logical fidelity on Willow.

The catch is that Google says this still has to be shown at a much larger scale, so the bottleneck isn’t solved and a practical fault-tolerant quantum computer isn’t here yet.

In 2012, thousands of 46-year-olds in northern Finland answered a short set of questions: how easily do you wake up, how tired are you in the first half hour, when do you prefer to work. Their answers sorted them into morning people, night owls and everyone in between. Finnish researchers then followed their work and pension records for the next 12 years. One group was far more likely to be forced out of work early.

When too much current flows, a superconductor’s paired electrons get ripped apart in a few billionths of a second, ending superconductivity. Researchers from Max Planck, ETH Zurich, Oxford and Shanghai built an optical-electrical circuit fast enough to catch it, then tested two materials: niobium nitride and a YBCO cuprate.

Niobium nitride stayed superconducting until a threshold, then dropped out abruptly, while YBCO faded gradually. The team ties the difference to each material’s electron pairing symmetry. The catch is that this is a fundamental physics result, not a new superconductor, and it was published in Nature Physics.

UC San Diego researchers used coherent X-ray diffraction to watch a vanadium dioxide “neuristor,” a device that mimics neuron-like switching, as current passed through it. Repeated stimulation above a threshold made tiny regions inside the material get “jammed,” so the device’s switching became more predictable, a physical record of its past activity.

Lower current reversed it, restoring the unpredictable state. The catch is that this is a mechanism in an experimental material, not a brain-inspired processor, and reliability across many devices and any real energy savings are still unproven.

Researchers at Chongqing University analyzed over 60 sediment samples from the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a deep-sea region between Mexico and Hawaii that is the world’s largest mineral exploration area, and identified 11,742 viruses. Only about 4% of their protein clusters matched any global database.

The viruses mostly infect bacteria and pose little threat to humans, but they help recycle nutrients and let microbes cope with toxic metals. The catch is that this same seafloor is targeted for mining, and the team says these communities could collapse if sediment plumes wipe out their hosts.

Air pollution is full of microscopic particles with very different chemistry, and figuring out which ones matter used to mean a researcher manually hunting through a sample for days. During an internship at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Carlos DeLeon built software called X-AutoMap that does a quick low-res scan, spots particles matching preset chemical patterns, then automatically zooms in on them.

It handled about 500 urban pollution particles in 10 hours instead of 44, and it separated iron-rich particles that looked like industrial emissions from ones that looked geological. The catch is that it only finds what scientists tell it to look for, and may miss very small or weakly signaling particles.

The brain learns not only through repetition but also by detecting when reality differs from expectations. Neuroscience research suggests that these mismatches, known as prediction errors, help the brain update its understanding of the world, adjust reward expectations and influence memory formation.

Research on predictive processing describes how the brain uses past experiences to anticipate incoming information. When new information conflicts with those predictions, the resulting error can help revise existing mental models. Computational work by Rajesh Rao and Dana Ballard in 1999 outlined how prediction errors could contribute to processing sensory information.

Dopamine research provides another perspective. A 1997 study by Wolfram Schultz, Peter Dayan and Read Montague showed that dopamine neurons respond to unexpected rewards and change their activity when expected rewards fail to arrive. These signals help explain how the brain learns from differences between expected and actual outcomes.

Memory research adds further complexity. A 2024 study in rats found that prediction errors influenced how memories were organised during fear extinction. Smaller errors could support updating existing memories, while larger errors could favour separate memory representations.

Together, these findings suggest that unexpected information can provide valuable learning signals. However, surprise alone does not guarantee better learning; its effects depend on context, the type of prediction error and the memory involved.

During a 10-week summer internship at Brookhaven National Laboratory, RIT student Robert Desjardins redesigned the storage stands for superconducting magnets, each about 20 feet long and over 10,000 pounds. The 1990s design held three magnets, and his four-tier version holds four in the same floor space.

Around 80 magnets are coming out of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider to be reused in the future Electron-Ion Collider, expected to start up in the mid-2030s. The $420,000 savings figure comes from the lab’s own engineer, and the article doesn’t say how it was calculated.

Most parents who worry about screens worry about their children's screens: the tablet at dinner, the cartoons before bed. Researchers in Norway decided to measure every screen in the house. They followed 747 children from about age 5 to 7, testing how many words each child understood every year, and recorded the kids' screen time, whether they owned a device, and how much their parents used social media and their phones. Only one of those screens tracked with slower progress.

In 2002, a new plastic softener called DINCH went on sale as the answer to a growing health scare. Phthalates, the chemicals that make plastic soft and bendy, had been linked to premature birth and fertility problems, and manufacturers wanted something safer. Now researchers across the United States have checked the urine of thousands of pregnant women for traces of the replacement. Then they looked at the babies.