Stanford researchers recently revealed how a seemingly physics-defying wireless communication technology works. The new technology, called thermal noise communication, harnesses background static that normally is the bane of radio, cellular and other wireless signals. In their new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team showed how a transmitter could deliver data to a receiver without any actively produced signal by manipulating tiny oscillations in voltage.

The findings describe how the system works at a fundamental level, opening the door to improv...

All neutron stars have intense magnetic fields. The typical magnetic field of a neutron star is about 100,000 times stronger than the strongest magnetic fields we can create on Earth. But about 1% of neutron stars have even stronger magnetic fields. Known as magnetars, their magnetic fields can be 1,000 times stronger than a regular magnetic field. They are a likely cause of powerful transient events such as soft gamma-ray repeaters and fast radio bursts. A new study looks at how magnetars might form. The findings are published on the arXiv preprint server.

The work focuses on the mergers of binary neutron stars...

A large-scale study, presented at UEG Week 2026, has identified distinct antibody patterns up to 10 years before the diagnosis of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), potentially opening new avenues for earlier risk detection and providing insights into future disease course.

IBD is a group of chronic conditions, including Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC), in which abnormal immune responses contribute to ongoing inflammation and damage in the digestive system...

Could computers include tiny brain organoids one day? The human brain is an incredibly energy-efficient computer, and silicon processors that try to imitate it achieve huge energy savings over traditional processors. Now scientists are experimenting with using organoids modeled on the human forebrain to develop energy-efficient biohybrid computing.

A crucial first step toward this is learning whether the organoids can receive and relay signals reliably, which a Bristol-based team of researchers investigated using braille letters. They found that teams of three brain organoids produced signals that accurately corresponded to different letters 83% of the time.

“We can take information from a real ta...