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Rights of Nature could give Lough Neagh the same status as a person, entitled to the same protections.

Rights of Nature could give Lough Neagh the same status as a person, entitled to the same protections.

A University of Alberta research team has designed a promising alternative for treating antimicrobial-resistant infections, a pressing global health issue. In a paper recently published in Cell Biomaterials, the team describes preclinical testing results for its human-derived peptide treatment, D-GK17. The peptide is stable and nontoxic to humans and is synthesized to attack the surfaces of bacterial or fungal cells that create biofilms, a sticky matrix that is often impenetrable to antibiotic treatments.

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A chemical analysis of residential soils and ash around California homes burned by the Eaton and Palisades wildfires in early 2025 revealed wide variation in contamination by potentially harmful elements, including lead, according to a study published in Environmental Science and Technology Letters on May 12. The researchers made their findings available to the Los Angeles Public Health Department over the course of the study.

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The world's most powerful particle accelerator will shutter operations Monday for four years of renovations to dramatically boost its collision capacity and the potential for unlocking one of the greatest mysteries of the universe: dark matter.

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Fossils tucked away in a museum drawer and identified merely as "feline" are actually from a very ancient and enigmatic saber-toothed cat that inhabited North America more than 5 million years ago. Newly identified by a UC Berkeley paleontologist, the nearly complete skull helps clarify how these large-fanged felines evolved over millennia before going extinct about 10,000 years ago.

Using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), astronomers have discovered a new millisecond pulsar as part of the ongoing Southern-sky MWA Rapid Two-metre (SMART) survey. The discovery is reported in a research paper published June 17 on the arXiv preprint server. The work has also been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Enzymes are regarded as the key to sustainable chemistry. Despite major advances in protein design, creating artificial enzymes from scratch has so far remained a grand challenge. A research team at the University of Bayreuth, in collaboration with scientists from the University of Ottawa, has now demonstrated how nonfunctional protein scaffolds can be transformed into highly active enzymes. The researchers report their findings in Nature Chemical Biology.

Large groups have their pros and cons. But a changing climate may push them off balance.

In quantum mechanics, the geometry of quantum states has emerged as a powerful framework for understanding phenomena ranging from electrical conductivity to superconductivity. One research direction aims to extend these geometric concepts to non-Hermitian quantum mechanics—where systems can exchange energy with their environment—including the generalization of the Berry phase, a key geometric quantity, to the non-Hermitian case.

A new podcast from All About History magazine dives into an alternate reality of what may have happened during the famous battles between Carthage and Rome.

Scientists investigating a proposed way to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using seawater have found that adding too much alkalinity to neutralize acids can trigger chemical reactions that undermine the process.

Howdy, pards, here's a quick roundup of the week's science news: Moose, previously thought to be a transplanted species, are actually native to Colorado. A digital twin of a two-year-old child's brain revealed neural signatures linked to autism. And a new gel treatment for severed spinal cords restored mobility in lab animals.

What did the very first complex vertebrate brain look like? To find out, scientists turned to an unlikely time traveler: the lamprey, a jawless, eel-like fish whose body plan has barely changed in roughly 360 million years.

A new study by an international research team led by Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig) has revealed striking similarities in the way humans and dogs interact in very different societies. The research is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

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Biologists group animals with similar traits into broad categories called orders. Despite their similarities, animal species in the same order can have very different average lifespans.

A large asteroid will zip past Earth this weekend, but don't worry: It poses no danger.

June 27, 2026: Our weekly roundup of the latest science in the news, as well as a few fascinating articles to keep you entertained over the weekend.

The record-breaking heatwave is set to end with cooler and more unsettled weather by Sunday.

Thanks to AI, one of the key pillars of scientific evidence — stunning imagery that often defies belief — is crumbling.