A team led by researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, has succeeded in identifying biomarkers for Parkinson’s disease in its earliest stages, before extensive brain damage has occurred...

Physical systems become inherently more complicated and difficult to produce in a lab as the number of dimensions they exist in increases—even more so in quantum systems. While discrete time crystals (DTCs) had been previously demonstrated in one dimension, two-dimensional DTCs were known to exist only theoretically. But now, a new study, published in Nature Communications, has demonstrated the existence of a DTC in a two-dimensional system using a 144-qubit quantum processor.

What is a discrete time crystal?
Like regular crystalline materials, DTCs exhibit a kind of periodicity...

Scientists continue to mine data gathered by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, retired in 2018, and continue to turn up surprises. A new paper reveals the latest: a possible rocky planet slightly larger than Earth, orbiting a sun-like star about 146 light-years away. The candidate planet, HD 137010b, might be remarkably similar to Earth, but it has one potentially big difference: It could be colder than perpetually frozen Mars.

A promising Earth-sized exoplanet emerges
An international science team published a paper on the discovery, “A Cool Earth-sized ...

The COVID-19 pandemic gave us tremendous perspective on how wildly symptoms and outcomes can vary between patients experiencing the same infection. How can two people infected by the same pathogen have such different responses? It largely comes down to variability in genetics (the genes you inherit) and life experience (your environmental, infection, and vaccination history).

These two influences are imprinted on our cells through small molecular alterations called epigenetic changes, which shape cell identity and function by controlling whether genes are turned “on” or “off.”

Salk Institute researchers are debuting a new epigenetic catalog that reveals the distinct effects of genetic inheritance and life experience on various types of immune cells...