New research shows that even in the famous Prisoner's Dilemma, where selfishness is supposed to prevail, cooperation can naturally emerge and persist, offering fresh insight into how complex life and human societies evolved.

Webcams commonly used by surfers are helping scientists measure Oregon's coastal fog, shows a study from UC Davis and the USDA Forest Service. 

New in Nature Communications: An interactively addressable organic metadevice brings pixel-level programmability to visible-light metasurfaces. This opens up new perspectives for adaptive optical technologies for imaging, communication, sensing or wearable photonics.

SAN ANTONIO — July 20, 2026 — Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has expanded the capabilities of its High Energy Annex Test (HEAT) facility to advance hypersonic and supersonic technology. The SwRI HEAT Facility, which was created in 2016 to support gas turbine combustor testing, can now simulate the extreme conditions experienced at hypersonic speeds. These upgrades make it possible for SwRI to test hypersonic systems technologies, such as scramjets, ramjets, small gas turbines, and rocket thrusters in a controlled environment. The work supports a project that seeks to address a critical gap in hypersonic vehicle development.

Space weather warnings could be received hours before Earth is hit rather than minutes with the help of a miniature UK-built instrument soon to be stationed in deep space. MAGIC (MAGnetometer from Imperial College) is part of the European Space Agency's Heliospheric Pioneer for Solar and Interplanetary Threats Defence (HENON) CubeSat mission, which is scheduled for launch in early 2027. By measuring the Sun's magnetic field much farther upstream than current real-time space weather monitors, the mission aims to extend advance warning of severe solar storms from just tens of minutes to several hours. The research is being presented at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting this week in Birmingham by Jonathan Eastwood, Professor of Space Physics in the Department of Physics (Blackett Laboratory) at Imperial College London.

Silicon photonics has emerged as a promising technology for addressing bandwidth and latency bottlenecks of conventional electrical interconnects and therefore are being explored for future artificial intelligence infrastructure. However, heterogenous integration of multiple material systems remains a challenge. Now, researchers show how micro-transfer printing can enable highly versatile heterogenous integration to expand the functionality of silicon photonics, paving the way for advanced photonic systems.

Researchers have developed a single machine-learning turbulence model that predicts a wide range of turbulent flows—without the manual zoning, switching, or tuning that conventional models require. Led by researchers at the University of Stuttgart, the work advances a long-sought goal in computational fluid dynamics: a unified turbulence model that handles many flow mechanisms within one framework. Details of the findings were published in National Science Review.