Time is vital to the functioning of our everyday lives: from the watches on our wrists to the GPS systems in our phones. Communication systems, power grids, and financial transactions all rely on precision timing. Seconds are the vital units of measurement in timekeeping.

Surprisingly, there is still debate over the definition of the second. But recent advances in the world’s most accurate forms of timekeeping may have just changed the game.

Accurate timekeeping has always been part of humankind’s social evolution...

As physicists continue their struggle to find and explain the origin of dark matter, the approximately 80% of the matter in the universe that we can’t see and so far haven’t been able to detect, researchers have now proposed a model where it is produced before the Big Bang.

Their idea is that dark matter would be produced during a infinitesimally short inflationary phase when the size of the universe quickly expanded exponentially. The new model was published in Physical Review Letters by three scientists from Texas in the US.

An intriguing idea among cosmologists is that dark matter was produced through its interaction with a thermal bath of some species, and its abundance is created by “freeze-out” or “freeze-in...

Researchers from Helmholtz Munich and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) have identified a mechanism that may explain the neurological symptoms of long COVID.

The study shows that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein remains in the brain’s protective layers, the meninges, and the skull’s bone marrow for up to four years after infection. This persistent presence of the spike protein could trigger chronic inflammation in affected individuals and increase the risk of neurodegenerative diseases.

The team, led by Prof. Ali Ertürk, Director at the Institute for Intelligent Biotechnologies at Helmholtz Munich, also found that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines significantly reduce the accumulation of the spike protein in the brain...

An international team of scientists has published a study highlighting the potential role of iron sulfides in the formation of life in early Earth’s terrestrial hot springs. According to the researchers, the sulfides may have catalyzed the reduction of gaseous carbon dioxide into prebiotic organic molecules via nonenzymatic pathways.

This work, appearing in Nature Communications, offers new insights into Earth’s early carbon cycles and prebiotic chemical reactions, underscoring the significance of iron sulfides in supporting the terrestrial hot springs origin of life hypothesis.

The study was conducted by Dr...