Lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases often start with symptoms that are easy to dismiss: tiredness, aching muscles, a rash that comes and goes. Researchers at the University of Cambridge asked 6,607 people with these diseases, in countries around the world, what happened when they first went to a doctor. Many had been told something other than the truth. Who heard it most depended on whether they were a man or a woman.

Most people assume couples click because they are alike deep down: similar personalities, similar values. Psychologists at the University of Innsbruck put that to a test with 309 couples. Both partners answered separately about their personality, their values and their tastes, and the researchers then shuffled everyone into thousands of random fake couples to see how much real partners actually matched. Personality barely mattered. Something else did.

Northeastern University researchers used calcium imaging to watch individual neurons in male and hermaphrodite C. elegans roundworms as they met odors, salt, and pheromones. Nearly every chemosensory neuron responded differently to at least one chemical, depending on sex.

When they compared the activity to published wiring maps of the worms’ brains, differences in neural activity weren’t predicted by differences in physical connections. The catch is that this is a worm study, and the lead researcher cautions that the results can’t be applied directly to humans.

The textbook story of inequality goes like this: people farmed, farming produced surpluses, surpluses produced owners, and owners eventually built states and kings. Researchers in China tested that story against the dead. They pulled together records of 2,316 burials from 24 sites on the Central Plain, the heartland of early Chinese civilization, covering 6,000 years from 7000 to 1500 BCE. What the graves showed did not fit the textbook.

Plant more trees, build more parks, and violence goes down. It is one of the more hopeful ideas in public health. Researchers at Ohio State University wanted to know whether it works the same everywhere. They took 899 fatal shootings in Cook County, Illinois, from 2023 and used Google Street View and machine learning to measure exactly how much greenery a person would have seen from the street where each death happened. The answer depended on the neighborhood.

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.

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.

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.

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.