Science

US officials canceled NASA’s ambitious Mars Sample Return program, leaving potential evidence of ancient life sitting on Mars. Could China beat them to it?

Owen Gaffney: Timo Boppart, professor of economics at Stockholm University and committee member of the prize in economic sciences. Can you summarise what this year’s economics prize was awarded for? Timo Boppart: This year’s prize is about the general topic of macroeconomic stabilisation policy. This is about government intervention to smooth out the fluctuations of macroeconomic variables like unemployment rate or the inflation rate over the business cycle. To get at the contribution, I have to take a little bit on a historical tour, because stabilisation policy is not a particularly new phenomenon. This kind of came up with John Maynard Keynes’ writing under the impression of the Great Depression. But the Keynesian recipe only worked so well until the 1970s. Then in the 1970s, we ended in this deflation period where we had high unemployment rates and high inflation, and the Keynesian recipe didn’t work anymore. This year’s prize is about rebuilding a framework that allows us to study business cycles and stabilisation policy.

EnglishEnglish (pdf)SwedishSwedish (pdf) The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2026 to

Popular science background: Microfoundations deliver macro insights (pdf)Populärvetenskaplig information: Mikrofundament ger makroinsikter (pdf) Economic development is characterised by alternating downturns and upturns. Stimulating or slowing down the economy at the right time can provide stability and allow us to avoid drawn-out recessions or runaway inflation. Robert E. Hall’s and Michael Woodford’s research has generated a paradigm shift in stabilisation policy. New Keynesian models, a result of their research, allow us to explain and quantify how stabilisation policy affects business cycles and are now used by central banks and finance ministries around the world.

Sound can be a tricksy beast to try to harness. It fills the world around us, bursting from its multitudinous sources, bouncing off surfaces as echoes – a property that makes sound both incredibly useful and deeply vexing, depending on where and how its reverberations occur. There are some circumstances where echoes can cause problems. The most obvious example is sound recording studios, but one major problem area is probably less obvious because it's far more ubiquitous – pipes. Consider ventilation, air conditioning, industrial exhaust, or even plumbing. Sound travels through the spaces enclosed in those pipes and ducts, and when it encounters an obstruction, a change in shape, or a closed end, it can start to rattle around like nobody's business. Now, scientists have developed an ingenious little device that can dramatically reduce those reflections by effectively 'swallowing' sound. It's called a sonic black hole, and the new design can be 3D-printed and inserted directly into an existing pipe – a major step forward from conventional designs that require the black hole to be built into the pipe itself.

What if some of the changes we associate with aging begin with the loss of a single protein deep inside the brain? Scientists investigating that possibility found that restoring a protein called Menin in older mice improved memory, balance, bone mass, and skin thickness in just 30 days. Even more surprisingly, supplementing the animals with a naturally occurring amino acid improved their learning and memory in only three weeks. The findings, originally published in March 2023 in PLOS Biology, came from researchers led by Lige Leng of Xiamen University in China. Their experiments identified a previously overlooked connection between inflammation, brain chemistry, and aging throughout the body. Although the results were obtained in mice, they raised an intriguing possibility: Some effects of aging may be influenced by biological processes in the brain that scientists could eventually learn to modify.

Piers Forster is Professor of Physical Climate Change and Director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds. He has previously served as a lead author on several IPCC assessment reports. Evidence of a rapidly changing climate and our improved scientific understanding is compelling nations to act, but not always in a good way. The science itself is facing well-organised obstruction. The consequences of politicising the evidence are now more apparent than ever, especially in the run-up to a crucial intergovernmental climate meeting taking place in Addis Ababa this week.

Popular GLP-1 medications used for weight loss and type 2 diabetes (such as Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, Zepbound, Victoza, and Trulicity) have been linked to an unexpected problem involving fingernails. A multinational study found that people taking these drugs were more than four times as likely to report nail detachment, a condition in which the nail separates from the skin underneath it. Researchers found that 39% of GLP-1 users experienced nail detachment, compared with just 9% of people who had never taken the medications. Nail discoloration was also considerably more common, and two-thirds (66%) of users reported at least one nail disorder.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) invites journalists to the Africa Science & Innovation Forum (ASIF), taking place from 27 to 29 October 2026 at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa Conference Centre in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Africa faces a persistent challenge: how to turn scientific advances and promising innovations into practical solutions that can improve food production, nutrition and livelihoods at scale. ASIF will focus on bridging this gap and is presented in collaboration with the Government of Ethiopia’s Agricultural Transformation Institute, the African Union Commission (AUC), the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM) and other partners. “ASIF is about turning Africa’s scientific knowledge and innovations into practical solutions that improve food security, strengthen resilience and create better opportunities for farmers, women and young people,” said Abebe Haile-Gabriel, FAO Assistant Director-General and Regional Representative for Africa.

image: Tattoo, a male harbor seal at Zoomarine in Italy, is featured on the cover of the fifth edition of The HFSP Science Digest. The mammal was part of a study conducted by an international HFSP Research Grant team. STRASBOURG, France, 12 October 2026 — How did life begin on Earth? Can plants adapt to a changing climate? What can the rhythmic abilities of aquatic mammals reveal about the evolution of communication? These are among the questions explored in HFSP Science Digest #5, published today by the International Human Frontier Science Program Organization (HFSPO).

image: The New Zealand banded dotterel (or double-banded plover) is endemic to New Zealand. While some remain all year round, most migrate to Australia for its warmer winters. On open beaches, shingle riverbeds and bare volcanic plateaus, banded dotterels – or double-banded plovers, as they are called in Australia – are a familiar and much-loved sight across New Zealand, the only country where these charismatic plovers breed. While some remain year-round, an estimated 70 per cent make a rather unusual migration: instead of flying north to warmer climes, as most migratory birds do, they head west, almost 3,000 kilometres across the Tasman Sea, to winter in Australia.

Members of NASA’s Perseverance Mars mission team gather in the Mars Yard at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California with a certificate from Guinness World Records marking the rover distance record on the Red Planet. Positioned in front of the team is OPTIMISM (Operational Perseverance Twin for Integration of Mechanisms and Instruments Sent to Mars), a full-scale engineering model used to plan the rover’s driving routes and science activities on Mars. NASA JPL, which is managed by Caltech, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover on behalf of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio. For more about Perseverance: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-2020-perseverance/

Science fiction invites us to imagine what is possible. Science fact helps us understand what is happening and what we can do about it. A new free public education series, “What’s Up, Earth?” will bring that spirit of discovery to conversations about the environmental issues affecting our communities and the scientific solutions taking shape. Launching Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026, the series is presented by the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science. It will connect the public with research and expertise from the school and collaborators across the University, making complex topics accessible and showing how science informs responses to real-world challenges.

Home>Job advertisement: 2 Postdoctoral researchers12 October 2026AFFIPRO Project explores how movements between professions reveal occupational affinities and differences in symbolic capital, combining quantitative and ethnographic approaches across three national contexts. We welcome applicants with a PhD in the social sciences, preferably sociology or political science, strong qualitative research skills, and an interest in social inequality. The successful candidates will coordinate ethnographic research and contribute to collaborative publications and the project’s scientific development. One-year, full-time CNRS contracts, with a possible extension subject to performance and funding. Fluency in French and proficiency in English are required. Apply before November 2. Positions start no later than January 1, 2027. See here for the full job description and application details.

image: The origin of bona fide GaGCL in vertebrates can be traced back approximately 200 million years ago in birds, marking a critical evolutionary milestone in the development of the mucosal adaptive immune system. This study demonstrates GC-like functional structures in the teleost fish gut, shedding light on the evolutionary origins of GCs. They established a viral infection model using SVCV oral gavage, which triggered pathological changes and strong immune responses in the gut. scRNA-seq revealed key ligand-receptor interactions between T and B cells driving GC reactions, including ALCAM-CD6, TNFSF14-TNFRSF14, TGFB1-TGFBR3, and TNFSF14-LTBR. Notably, GaGCL structures were identified within the gut LP, characterized by spatial gradients of cxcr4+ and cxcr5+ expression, elevated expression of aicda+ and mki67+ transcripts, and co-localization of SVCV-specific IgM+ B cells. Additionally, significant B cell proliferation alongside apoptosis was uniquely observed within these GaGCLs in infected fish. These results suggest that gut cell types and functional characteristics are similar between teleost and mammals.

About 40 years ago, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky made some wonderful discoveries. They identified a set of heuristics that people use — availability, representativeness, anchoring and adjustment, and even drawing inferences from small samples. Previously, thought leaders like Karl Duncker and Alan Newell and Herb Simon had discussed the importance of heuristics, but Kahneman and Tversky actually identified a set of specific types of heuristics that we commonly apply, and for this, Kahneman and Tversky deserve the accolades and prizes they received. However, the Heuristics and Biases community that sprung up from their work took an unfortunate trajectory. It equated heuristics with biases. The term “bias” can mean preference or predisposition, but the primary understanding is that a biased judgment is not logical or justified. This conflation made some sense because the research methodology used by Kahneman and Tversky and others was to demonstrate that people use heuristics even when the heuristics yield inaccurate judgments.