Science Bytes

What would an alien Dyson sphere — a shell built to capture a star's entire energy output — actually look like to our telescopes? A single-author study by Amirnezam Amiri models the infrared signatures of these hypothetical megastructures around two ... more

For the last ten thousand years, human evolution has been running on overdrive to keep up with massive lifestyle changes like farming. By analyzing over 15,000 ancient genomes alongside modern DNA, researchers mapped a giant genetic relationship matr... more

How a desert lizard's venom became the best-selling medicines on Earth. We trace the science of GLP-1 receptor agonists from 1990 — when endocrinologist John Eng isolated exendin-4 from Gila monster venom, a hormone that mimics human GLP-1 but lasts ... more

Part 4 of 4, the finale. Cold fusion never quite died — and lately it has been revived by unlikely backers. We trace Google's multi-year, multi-lab investigation and NASA's lattice-confinement work, the newer research programs now funding the field, ... more

Part 3 of 4. Cold fusion's most reproducible finding is also its strangest prerequisite: you have to cram deuterium into palladium past a critical loading ratio — roughly 0.85 to 0.90 deuterium atoms per palladium atom — before anything happens at al... more

Part 2 of 4. If cold fusion really released nuclear-scale energy, it should betray itself two ways: as heat you can measure and as nuclear ash you can detect. We dig into calorimetry — how you actually measure excess heat in an electrochemical cell, ... more

Part 1 of 4. Before we can weigh the extraordinary claim of cold fusion, we need the ordinary physics it defies. We build the yardstick: the electrostatic Coulomb barrier that keeps two nuclei apart, the quantum tunneling that rarely lets them throug... more

For over a century, generating electricity has relied on boiling water to spin massive turbines. Thermophotovoltaics offer a quieter alternative by using specialized solar cells to capture intense light from glowing-hot materials and convert it direc... more