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A team of researchers in China has unveiled a technique that—theoretically—could crack the most common methods used to ensure digital privacy, using a rudimentary quantum computer. The technique worked in a small-scale demonstration, the researchers report, but other specialists are sceptical that the procedure could be scaled up to beat ordinary computers at the task. […]

In early October 2022 Jane Stadnik, a family resource specialist at the Parent Education & Advocacy Leadership (PEAL) Center in Pittsburgh, Pa., got a frantic call from the mother of a three-year-old boy who was about to be expelled from preschool. The school was tiring of his disruptive behavior, which, it claimed, included throwing blocks, […]

With dozens of large telescopes scattered across Earth and some well above it, you might think we’ve pretty much discovered all there is to find in the sky. But this is, literally, too narrow a view. The recent discovery of a huge cloud of gas floating near the Andromeda galaxy—one of the most extensively studied […]

Scientist Leona Zacharias was a rare woman. She graduated from Barnard College in 1927 with a bachelor’s degree in biology, followed by a Ph.D. from Columbia University. But throughout her career, she labored behind men with loftier titles who got the bulk of the credit. In the 1940s, when premature newborns were going blind after being […]

Science has long known that people living in what is now Siberia once walked (and later paddled boats) across the Bering Strait into North America. But new evidence now shows that these early migrations weren’t one-way trips: in a study published on Thursday in Current Biology, researchers say they have uncovered traces of Native American […]

The fossilization process is an unrelenting slog of decay, compression and erosion that can take millions of years and favors the preservation of tough material such as bones, teeth and shells. But with a little bit of sticky tree resin and a lot of luck, delicate bits of plants and tiny critters can sometimes last […]

Oceans hit their warmest levels on record for the fourth consecutive year in 2022, according to a new report by two dozen scientists. Previous heat records were broken in 2021, 2020 and 2019, and all of the top six hottest levels have occurred in the last six years. It’s an ominous sign of the speed […]

Scientists and manufacturers are charting a path toward material sustainability The circular economy minimizes waste and maximizes reuse. Credit: Jan Kallwejt Advertisement At a family gathering in August, I gave a brief tribute to my mother on the occasion of her 90th birthday. As the guests sipped their coffee in the warm summer air, I […]

Every year more than 600,000 people die from mosquito-transmitted malaria, most of them children under age five. Some insects that are disease vectors, such as mosquitoes, are currently expanding their range around the world, bringing new threats. Genetic engineering can fix this by permanently altering insect genes through what is known as a gene drive. […]

An artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot can write such convincing fake research-paper abstracts that scientists are often unable to spot them, according to a preprint posted on the bioRxiv server in late December1. Researchers are divided over the implications for science. “I am very worried,” says Sandra Wachter, who studies technology and regulation at the University of […]