249 stories from 22 sources
The month in Science
Longest running story: 26 days
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The month moved from persistent ocean warming and record heat to exceptional El Niño risks, weakening circulation, Himalayan hazards, and the rapid loss of Papua’s permanent snow. Climate change increasingly appeared as a connected threat to forecasts, ecosystems, infrastructure, health, and vulnerable communities rather than a series of isolated extremes.
A lawsuit over NIH keyword screening expanded into a broader challenge to politically filtered grant decisions. Proposed NIH grant caps and an NSF funding overhaul showed that research priorities were also being reshaped through administrative and political pressure.
Dark-matter anomalies and new survey capacity opened avenues without establishing a particle discovery, while quantum experiments attacked practical bottlenecks. LHC data ruled out another class of models even as CERN prepared a rebuild to collect more evidence.
An alleged AI solution to the Navier-Stokes problem remained unverified after mathematicians questioned the proof and its provenance. A separate AI-assisted CRISPR-like enzyme discovery reached wet-lab testing, but independent replication and attribution still limited the claim.
Ancient DNA pushed plague’s origins back before cities and then revealed repeated European returns over more than four centuries. Those findings recast the disease as both older and more persistent than conventional histories suggested.
Studies linked coordinated brain changes and an immune pathway to different patterns of aging, while mouse work reported possible reversal of aging signs. The field increasingly treated aging as a set of biological processes with potential intervention windows rather than one undifferentiated decline.
Week’s Recap