Science in telegram

🧠 An Ordinary Laptop Just Solved a Quantum Problem That Challenged a Quantum Computer

Last year, researchers using D-Wave’s quantum annealer argued that a particularly difficult quantum simulation was beyond the reach of classical computers.

Now physicists at the Flatiron Institute have shown otherwise.

Using tensor networks together with belief propagation—an algorithm first developed in the 1980s—they reproduced the same results using classical hardware, with some of the calculations running on a personal laptop.

The challenge involved simulating hundreds of interacting qubits arranged in complex 2D and 3D lattices. Instead of storing the impossibly large quantum wave function directly, the researchers compressed it into a far more efficient mathematical representation.

The work doesn’t diminish quantum computing. Instead, it raises the bar for what counts as quantum advantage. Every breakthrough in classical algorithms forces quantum hardware to tackle even harder problems—and advances in quantum computing continue to inspire smarter classical methods in return.

Paper (Science): https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adx2728

#QuantumComputing #Physics #TensorNetworks #Science

👁️ Your Eyes May Have Evolved From an Ancient “Cyclops” Organ

Every vertebrate eye — including yours — may trace its origins to a single light-sensitive organ that sat in the middle of the head of a distant ancestor nearly 600 million years ago.

In a new Current Biology study, researchers from Lund University and the University of Sussex propose that an early worm-like ancestor lost its paired eyes after adopting a sedentary lifestyle. What remained was a simple median light-sensitive organ.

Millions of years later, as its descendants became active swimmers, evolution may have repurposed this central organ to form the paired retinas of vertebrates. The same ancestral system also appears to have given rise to the pineal gland, which today regulates our circadian rhythms and melatonin production.

If correct, this model could explain why vertebrate eyes are fundamentally different from those of insects and squid — and why the systems controlling vision and sleep may share a common evolutionary origin.

One important caveat: this is an evolutionary reconstruction, supported by anatomy, developmental biology, and neuroscience, rather than the discovery of a fossil “cyclops.”

📄 Paper: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(25)01676-8

#Evolution #Biology #Vision #Neuroscience #Science

📊 The U-Curve of Happiness: Why Life Often Gets Better After 50
For decades, the “midlife crisis” was dismissed as little more than a cultural stereotype. But large-scale research suggests it reflects a real statistical pattern.
Economist David Blanchflower (Dartmouth College) analyzed well-being data from 145 countries, controlling for income, education, employment, and marital status. Published in the Journal of Population Economics (2021), the study found a remarkably consistent U-shaped relationship between age and life satisfaction.

Finding Detail

🌍 Scope
145 countries across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas

📉 Lowest point
Life satisfaction typically reaches its minimum in the late 40s (around age 47 in developed countries)

📈 Recovery
Happiness generally rises again through the 50s and 60s, often returning to — or even exceeding — earlier levels

🔁 Consistency
The U-shaped pattern appears across a wide range of cultures and economies, although its strength varies

⚖️ Controls
Results remain after accounting for income, education, marital status, and employment
Why might this happen?

Several explanations have been proposed:
• During midlife, expectations often collide with reality as career growth slows and responsibilities peak — raising children, caring for aging parents, and managing financial pressures.
• Later in life, many people experience fewer competing demands, adjust their expectations, and become more emotionally resilient.
• Neuroscience may offer part of the explanation as well. Separate studies suggest that older adults tend to respond less strongly to negative experiences and naturally focus more on positive ones — although this was not the primary focus of Blanchflower’s research.
One important caveat: this is a population-level trend, not a prediction for any individual. Physical health, close relationships, financial security, and life events remain far more important determinants of happiness than age itself.
Blanchflower’s analysis suggests that the U-shaped pattern of well-being is surprisingly widespread across countries, although its exact shape varies between populations.

📄 Source: Blanchflower D.G. Is happiness U-shaped everywhere? Age and subjective well-being in 145 countries. Journal of Population Economics (2021). DOI: 10.1007/s00148-020-00797-z
#Psychology #Happiness #WellBeing #Science #Aging

🧬 AI Discovers a Natural Peptide That Could Rival Ozempic

Researchers at Stanford Medicine have used artificial intelligence to identify a naturally occurring human peptide that suppresses appetite and promotes weight loss in mice—while avoiding the major side effects commonly associated with GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic.

The newly discovered molecule, called BRP, is only 12 amino acids long. Yet in early laboratory experiments, it activated appetite-regulating neurons far more strongly than existing GLP-1 peptides.

Unlike semaglutide, which acts on receptors throughout the brain, gut, pancreas, and other tissues, BRP appears to target primarily the hypothalamus—the brain region responsible for regulating hunger and metabolism. That more focused mechanism may explain why researchers observed no signs of nausea, constipation, anxiety, or muscle loss in the animal studies.

The discovery itself was powered by AI. Stanford’s Peptide Predictor analyzed more than 20,000 human protein-coding genes, searching for hidden biologically active peptides. From 2,683 candidates, researchers narrowed the list to just 100 for laboratory testing—and BRP emerged as the standout.

In obese mice, a single injection reduced food intake by up to 50% within one hour. After two weeks of treatment, the animals lost significant body fat while untreated mice continued gaining weight. The peptide also improved glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity.

“Nothing we’ve tested before has compared to semaglutide’s ability to decrease appetite and body weight. We are very eager to learn if it is safe and effective in humans.” — Dr. Katrin Svensson

The findings are still preclinical, meaning BRP has not yet been tested in humans. But if future clinical trials confirm these results, it could represent a new generation of obesity treatments: delivering GLP-1-like benefits through a much more targeted biological pathway—with fewer unwanted side effects.

📄 Nature (2025)

#AI #Obesity #WeightLoss #Ozempic #Neuroscience #StanfordMedicine #science

🦷 Scientists May Have Found a Way to Regrow Tooth Enamel

For decades, dentists have faced a frustrating reality: once tooth enamel is lost, it never naturally grows back. Researchers at the University of Nottingham may have found a way to change that.

In a study published in Nature Communications, the team developed a protein-based biomaterial that mimics the way enamel forms during early childhood—the only time our bodies naturally produce it.

Instead of simply coating the tooth like conventional treatments, the material acts as a microscopic scaffold. It penetrates tiny defects in damaged enamel, then recruits calcium and phosphate ions from saliva, guiding them to grow new enamel crystals that integrate seamlessly with the existing tooth.

In laboratory tests on extracted human teeth, the regenerated enamel closely matched the natural material in both structure and mechanical performance. It also withstood simulated brushing, chewing, and repeated exposure to acidic conditions, suggesting it could be durable enough for everyday use.

Unlike today’s fluoride treatments—which mainly slow further damage—this approach is designed to restore enamel rather than simply protect what’s left.

The researchers have launched a startup, Mintech-Bio, to commercialize the technology and hope to bring the first products toward clinical use in the coming year. However, human clinical trials are still needed before the treatment can become widely available.

If future trials confirm these results, dentistry could gradually shift from “drill and fill” to actually rebuilding damaged teeth.

📖 Source: Nature Communications (2025)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-64982-y

#Dentistry #Biomaterials #Enamel #RegenerativeMedicine #Science

🌿 Ordinary Moss Produces Electrical Waves That Travel Across Its Tissue

Moss may look like one of nature’s quieter creations. Electrically, however, it appears to be surprisingly active.

Computer scientist Andy Adamatzky inserted electrodes into cushions of the common moss Brachythecium rutabulum and recorded their electrical activity continuously for 178 hours.

The moss produced several distinct patterns: rapid spikes, slower rhythmic oscillations, and very slow depolarization waves. Some signals appeared first at one electrode and later at another, suggesting that electrical activity was travelling across the tissue rather than occurring everywhere simultaneously.

Some spikes resembled action potentials and neuron-like spike trains. But resemblance is not equivalence: moss has no neurons, no brain, and the study provides no evidence that it thinks or possesses anything resembling consciousness.

What it may show is that a moss cushion behaves as a distributed, electrically connected system. One day, such living networks could potentially be used in biohybrid sensors, responsive building materials, or unconventional computing.

The interpretation remains preliminary. For now, the moss is not solving equations — but it may be coordinating electrical activity beneath our feet.

Could future computers be partly grown rather than manufactured?

📄 Royal Society Open Science
DOI: 10.1098/rsos.252341

#PlantBiology #Moss #BioComputing #LivingMaterials #UnconventionalComputing

💻 Classical Computers Just Overturned a Major Quantum Advantage Claim

In 2025, researchers used D-Wave’s Advantage2 quantum annealer to simulate the dynamics of hundreds of interacting qubits — and argued that the task was beyond the reach of classical computers.

A team from the Flatiron Institute and Boston University has now reproduced those results using classical algorithms and relatively modest hardware. Some of the initial calculations even ran on a personal laptop.

The challenge involved quantum spin glasses: disordered systems in which hundreds of interacting qubits evolve across two- and three-dimensional lattices. Tracking the complete quantum wave function directly would require an amount of memory that grows exponentially with the number of qubits.

The researchers avoided that explosion using tensor networks — mathematical structures that compress a quantum state by retaining its most important correlations.

Think of it as a highly specialized zip file for quantum information.

They combined tensor networks with belief propagation, an algorithm developed in the 1980s and recently adapted for quantum systems. The calculations were implemented using ITensor, a high-performance tensor-network software library.

The classical simulations:

• reproduced the quantum computer’s results
• matched theoretical predictions and exact benchmarks
• scaled to systems containing hundreds of qubits
• captured quantum dynamics in complex 3D lattice geometries

There is one important caveat: the entire study was not completed on an ordinary laptop. A laptop was sufficient for some early calculations, while the largest simulations required more powerful conventional processors and GPUs.

Still, the result directly challenges the earlier claim that this particular problem was beyond classical computation.

It does not mean quantum computers are useless. It means that demonstrating genuine quantum advantage requires beating the best classical algorithms available — not merely the best ones researchers happened to test previously.

The boundary between classical and quantum computing is not fixed. Every improvement in quantum hardware gives classical researchers a new target, while every better classical algorithm raises the bar for quantum advantage.

Sometimes the strongest competitor to a quantum computer is not another quantum computer.

It is better mathematics.

📄 Paper: Dynamics of disordered quantum systems with two- and three-dimensional tensor networks
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adx2728

#QuantumComputing #Physics #TensorNetworks #ClassicalComputing #QuantumPhysics

Elon Musk predicts that programming will "die" by the end of the year due to AI. @science

🧬 Semaglutide May Slow Biological Aging, First Randomized Human Evidence Suggests

GLP-1 drugs such as semaglutide are already well known for treating obesity and type 2 diabetes. Now, researchers at UC San Diego report the first randomized placebo-controlled evidence that the drug may also slow biological aging — at least as measured by epigenetic aging clocks.

The team analyzed DNA methylation data from a 32-week, double-blind clinical trial involving 108 adults with HIV-associated lipohypertrophy. Participants received either weekly semaglutide injections or placebo. Researchers then used multiple epigenetic clocks — molecular biomarkers that estimate biological aging from chemical modifications to DNA — to evaluate changes in aging rate.

The results, published in Nature Communications, showed that semaglutide significantly slowed several independent measures of biological aging. On the DunedinPACE clock, the pace of aging slowed by about 9%. Significant improvements were also observed with the PCGrimAge clock, which is associated with mortality and age-related disease risk.

A separate 24-week pilot study in people with HIV and fatty liver disease reported that about 42% of participants showed a reduction in DunedinPACE after semaglutide treatment, although that study had no placebo control and should be interpreted cautiously.

In simple terms: epigenetic clocks don’t measure your chronological age. They estimate how quickly the molecular processes associated with aging are progressing. A 9% reduction means these biomarkers changed more slowly during treatment — not that people became 9% younger.

Scientists think several mechanisms may contribute. Semaglutide reduces chronic inflammation, decreases harmful visceral fat, and improves metabolic health — all processes linked to accelerated aging. These changes may influence molecular pathways involved in aging across multiple organ systems.

Key findings:

• ~9% slower pace of aging on the DunedinPACE clock
• Significant improvement in the PCGrimAge mortality-risk clock
• Similar effects across several independent epigenetic aging clocks
• A separate pilot study found ~42% of participants showed slower epigenetic aging after treatment

The study also has important limitations. This was a post hoc exploratory analysis, not a trial originally designed to study aging. Participants all had HIV-associated lipohypertrophy, a condition associated with accelerated biological aging, so the findings cannot yet be generalized to healthy individuals. Most importantly, improvements in epigenetic clocks do not prove that semaglutide extends lifespan or healthspan. Those questions will require much longer clinical studies.

Why it matters: Tens of millions of people already take GLP-1 drugs worldwide. If future studies confirm these findings in broader populations, semaglutide could become one of the first widely used medications shown to influence molecular biomarkers of human aging — extending its impact far beyond weight loss.

📄 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-72861-3

#Longevity #Semaglutide #GLP1 #Aging #Healthspan

🤖 OpenAI Just Released Three Versions of GPT-5.6 — and the Most Important One May Not Be the Flagship

On July 9, OpenAI released GPT-5.6 as a family of three models rather than a single flagship:

• Sol — the most capable version, priced at $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens
• Terra — a balanced model with performance competitive with GPT-5.5 at roughly half the price: $2.50/$15
• Luna — the fastest and cheapest version, priced at $1/$6

Sol is designed for difficult coding, scientific research, cybersecurity, and long-running agentic tasks. It also introduces an ultra mode that can coordinate parallel subagents to solve complex problems.

But Terra may be the more consequential release.

If it consistently delivers something close to GPT-5.5 performance at half the cost, many companies may have little reason to use the flagship for everyday workloads. Sol wins benchmarks and headlines; Terra could win production volume.

OpenAI also launched ChatGPT Work, a workspace that can gather context from connected tools and turn it into finished spreadsheets, documents, presentations, analyses, and other deliverables.

This suggests that the AI race is moving beyond model intelligence alone.

Nikolas Bush Take

1. Model portfolios are replacing the idea of one universal model

OpenAI is beginning to resemble a cloud provider: instead of asking which model is “best,” customers choose the right combination of intelligence, latency, and price.

That makes the middle tier strategically important. Terra could become the default model for businesses, while Sol remains the premium option for the hardest tasks.

2. Government involvement in frontier-model launches is becoming harder to ignore

OpenAI initially released GPT-5.6 through a limited preview after discussing the models’ capabilities with the US government. The company said trusted partners were selected with government involvement before broader availability.

Anthropic faced an even more direct intervention: access to Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 was suspended after US export controls were imposed, before Fable 5 returned globally on July 1 with stronger safeguards.

This is not yet a formal regulatory system. But a de facto pre-release review process for highly capable AI models may be emerging through government pressure, security testing, and access restrictions.

3. The real competition is shifting toward the workspace

When several frontier models reach similar levels of capability, the surrounding product becomes more important.

The winner may not be the company with the highest benchmark score. It may be the company that owns the environment where people research, write, analyze data, build presentations, manage projects, and automate everyday work.

Models can increasingly be replaced. Workflows, integrations, organizational data, and user habits are much harder to displace.

Independent testing of GPT-5.6 is still limited, and many performance claims come from OpenAI’s own evaluations. Terra’s price-performance advantage therefore needs to be validated across real business workloads.

But the broader direction is already visible:

The era of one flagship model for every task may be ending. The next phase of AI will be fought through portfolios, workflows, and distribution.

Sources:
https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-6/
https://openai.com/index/previewing-gpt-5-6-sol/
https://openai.com/chatgpt-work/
https://www.anthropic.com/news/redeploying-fable-5

#AI #OpenAI #GPT56 #ChatGPT #ArtificialIntelligence #NikolasBushTake

🔭 Physicists Recreated a Black-Hole-Inspired Effect — in a Circuit With No Moving Parts

More than 50 years ago, Roger Penrose proposed that rotational energy could be extracted from a spinning black hole. Yakov Zel’dovich later predicted a wave version of the effect: an object rotating fast enough could transfer some of its energy to incoming waves, amplifying them.

The problem was speed. Reproducing the effect with electromagnetic waves would require rotation far beyond the limits of ordinary machinery.

Researchers at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center have now bypassed that obstacle with a stationary radio-frequency circuit. It contains three coupled electronic resonators whose properties are modulated in a precisely timed sequence. Nothing physically rotates, but the traveling modulation pattern acts like ultrafast “synthetic rotation.”

Waves carrying the appropriate orbital angular momentum emerged amplified, with a reported net gain of up to 7.8 decibels. The experiment, published in Nature, demonstrates what the researchers call Floquet rotational superradiance.

There is no free energy involved. The additional energy comes from the external drive used to modulate the circuit — not from an actual black hole. The researchers also stress that this is not a one-to-one replica of Zel’dovich’s original rotating-object proposal, but a related effect combining rotational Doppler physics with parametric amplification.

Counterintuitively, ordinary losses in the circuit helped broaden the conditions under which amplification occurred.

The platform could provide a new way to study extreme rotational wave physics and may eventually inspire selective amplifiers, photonic devices and communication technologies.

What other seemingly impossible physical environments could be recreated using synthetic motion?

📄 Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10725-y

#Physics #BlackHoles #Superradiance #Metamaterials

🌌 We @science May Have Finally Figured Out Why the Universe Is Expanding…

The explanation is surprisingly simple.

Large language models operate using tokens. Every time a model generates a new response, it processes the accumulated context of the conversation.

As the dialogue grows, each new message adds more information — while the model must repeatedly process everything that came before. The total amount of processed information therefore grows almost geometrically within every conversation.

Now imagine that the Universe is actually one enormous artificial intelligence.

Every new star, planet, living organism, human thought, cat video, and online argument adds more tokens to the global conversation. The context keeps growing in geometric progression, so the system needs more and more space to process it all.

That is why the Universe is expanding.

Dark energy may have nothing to do with it. Someone simply forgot to click “Start a new chat.” 😅

#science #space #universe #AI

🌊 Scientists Find Why Some Animals Survived Earth’s Worst Mass Extinction

About 252 million years ago, the Permian–Triassic extinction erased most marine species and permanently reshaped life in the oceans. A new Stanford-led study suggests that survival depended partly on how animals’ oxygen requirements changed as the water warmed.

Researchers measured oxygen consumption in living brachiopods and other animals representing the “Paleozoic” and modern marine faunas. At cooler temperatures, brachiopods could tolerate remarkably low oxygen levels. But as the water warmed, the minimum amount of oxygen they needed rose much faster.

Their slow metabolism was not the problem by itself. More active groups generally had muscles, gills and respiratory systems better able to supply additional oxygen under heat stress.

This may explain why brachiopods and crinoids were devastated, while bivalves, snails, fish and echinoderms suffered fewer losses and later came to dominate the oceans.

The extinction was therefore not completely random — but metabolism was not the only factor either. Warming and ocean deoxygenation acted through animals’ physiology, alongside stresses such as acidification.

Modern oceans are also warming and losing oxygen. The study does not predict another “Great Dying,” but it shows how strongly climate can favour some body plans over others.

Could the next reshuffling of ocean life be determined by which animals can keep breathing as the water heats up?

📄 Study: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2533086123

#Paleontology #MassExtinction #MarineBiology #OceanWarming #ClimateChange

🤖 NEO Just Got New Hands

25 degrees of freedom.

Still far from matching the human hand, of course — but the progress is impressive.

The company calls them an “API to the physical world.”

https://www.1x.tech/discover/neos-hands

#Robotics #NEO #RobotHands #gadget #science

🐸 A Frog Gut Bacterium Eliminated Colorectal Tumors in Mice

A bacterium found in the gut of Japanese tree frogs has shown a striking anti-cancer effect in mice.

Researchers at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) screened 45 bacterial strains isolated from amphibians and reptiles, including Japanese tree frogs, fire belly newts, and grass lizards. One strain stood out: Ewingella americana, a naturally occurring bacterium from the intestines of the Japanese tree frog.

In a mouse model of colorectal cancer, a single intravenous dose of E. americana led to complete tumor elimination in all treated mice — a 100% complete response rate in that experiment.

The bacterium appears to work in two ways.

First, it accumulates inside tumors, where oxygen levels are low and blood vessels are unusually leaky. Once there, the bacterial population increased by roughly 3,000 times within 24 hours, directly damaging cancer cells.

Second, it seems to wake up the immune system. The treatment attracted T cells, B cells, and neutrophils into the tumor and boosted inflammatory signals such as TNF-α and IFN-γ, helping the body attack the cancer more aggressively.

The safety data in mice were also encouraging. The bacteria disappeared from the bloodstream within 24 hours, did not colonize healthy organs such as the liver, spleen, lungs, kidneys, or heart, and caused only temporary mild inflammation. Over a 60-day observation period, the researchers reported no chronic toxicity.

But the caveat is essential: this is still mouse research.

Many cancer therapies look spectacular in preclinical models and fail later in humans. A living bacterium injected into the bloodstream would face a much higher safety bar in people, and the human immune response could be very different.

Still, the study is an unusually strong proof of concept for bacterial cancer therapy. Instead of simply changing the gut microbiome, the researchers used a living bacterium as a tumor-targeting agent — one that both attacks cancer cells and recruits the immune system.

The big takeaway: one of the next ideas in cancer therapy may come not from a synthetic drug library, but from the gut of a frog.

Original paper, Gut Microbes:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19490976.2025.2599562

DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1080/19490976.2025.2599562

ScienceDaily summary:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/07/260709160655.htm

JAIST press release:
https://www.jaist.ac.jp/english/whatsnew/press/2025/12/17-1.html

#CancerResearch #Microbiome #Immunotherapy #Biotech

🧬 Harvard Built a Silicon Chip That Can Write DNA Using Electricity and Water

Writing custom DNA has barely changed in decades. Today’s DNA synthesis relies on phosphoramidite chemistry—a highly effective but solvent-intensive process that depends on hazardous chemicals and specialized manufacturing facilities.

Researchers at Harvard have now demonstrated a completely different approach: parallel enzymatic DNA synthesis on a semiconductor chip, controlled simply by electricity in water.

The CMOS chip contains 64 programmable synthesis sites, each surrounded by two concentric ring electrodes. When current flows through the inner ring, it generates protons that create a tiny acidic region—exactly what’s needed to remove the temporary blocking group from a growing DNA strand. At the same time, the outer ring consumes escaping protons, preventing neighboring reactions from interfering with one another.

Using this approach, the team synthesized 64 different DNA sequences, each 38–39 nucleotides long, entirely in an aqueous enzymatic process. Previous demonstrations of parallel enzymatic DNA synthesis were limited to roughly a dozen sequences, making this the largest demonstration of its kind so far.

The hardware has an unusual history. It was originally developed for recording electrical activity from thousands of neurons. The researchers later realized that the same ability to precisely control microscopic electrical currents could also be used to control chemical reactions needed for DNA synthesis.

Key points:

• 64 unique DNA sequences synthesized in parallel
• Water-based enzymatic process instead of traditional solvent-heavy chemistry
• Precise local pH control using dual concentric electrodes
• DNA strands up to 39 nucleotides long
• Demonstrated storage of a 169-byte text message in the synthesized DNA

The technology is still at an early stage. DNA strands of 39 nucleotides are far shorter than real genes, which typically contain thousands of bases. According to the researchers, the main limitation is now the chemistry used to remove temporary protecting groups—not the chip itself—suggesting that future advances may come from improved chemistry rather than new electronics.

If the method can be scaled, it could eventually make DNA manufacturing cleaner, cheaper, and more accessible for synthetic biology, diagnostics, gene therapies, and even DNA-based data storage, one of the highest-density storage media ever proposed.

📄 Nature Electronics: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-026-01662-9
🏛 Harvard SEAS: https://seas.harvard.edu/news/making-dna-semiconductor-chip

#DNA #SyntheticBiology #Biotechnology #Semiconductors #DataStorage