A study of ancient lake sediments reveals that a recent wildfire high in the Rwenzori Mountains was the first in 12 millennia, signaling a novel threat to Africa’s unique alpine ecosystems.

MIT researchers developed a way to precisely move columns of individual atoms within a material, to produce exotic quantum properties. The approach works in minutes at room temperature, and could aid the development of stable quantum devices.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have developed ApexGO, an AI-powered method for improving promising but imperfect antibiotic candidates. Unlike many AI approaches that screen databases for molecules that might work, ApexGO starts with a small number of starter molecules and makes step-by-step edits, using a predictive algorithm to guide the search toward stronger versions. In tests against disease-causing bacteria, 85% of the AI-generated molecules halted bacterial growth, while 72% outperformed the peptides from which they were derived. The work points toward a more systematic approach to antibiotic discovery, using AI to guide researchers toward molecules most worth testing.

A new method could enable physicists to spot signs of dark matter in gravitational waves that are detected on Earth. This could occur if two colliding black holes spiral through a dense region of dark matter and merge, leaving an imprint in gravitational waves that are rippling across space and time.

CSHL Associate Professor Saket Navlakha and former graduate student Cici Zheng have discovered a naturally occurring Voronoi diagram in Chinese money plants’ leaves. Their research answers a longstanding question in biology regarding the mathematics of looping vein structures and could help explain how plants solve complex problems in nature.