Science

We can usually agree what objects look like, but why?Martin Bond / Alamy Our world seems to be fundamentally fuzzy at the quantum level, yet we do not experience it that way. Researchers have now developed a recipe for measuring how quickly the objective reality that we do experience emerges from this fuzziness, strengthening the case that a framework inspired by evolutionary principles can explain why it emerges at all. In the quantum realm, each object – such as a single atom – exists in a cloud of possible states and assumes a well-defined, or “classical”, state only after being measured or observed. But we observe strictly classical objects free of existentially fuzzy parts, and the mechanism that makes this so has long puzzled physicists. In 2000, Wojciech Zurek a...

The work reveals which human-driven activities are the main drivers Adapted from a press release produced by the University of California, Irvine. The sinking is placing more than 236 million people at increased flooding risk in the near future. The findings could help communities residing in deltas better prioritize immediate local interventions alongside climate adaptation efforts. The world’s deltas are home to hundreds of millions of people—but there’s a problem: they’re sinking. New research published in Nature by scientists from the University of California, Irvine, Columbia University and other institutions documents the rate of elevation loss in the world’s deltas and finds that human activities are the primary reason for it. “This careful study is the first compre...

Today’s most powerful AI tools – the ones that can summarise documents, generate artwork, write poetry or predict how incredibly complex proteins fold – all stand on the shoulders of the “transformer”. This neural network architecture, first announced in 2017 at an unassuming conference centre in California, enables machines to process information in a way that reflects how humans think. Previously, most state-of-the-art AI models relied on a technique called a recurrent neural network. This worked by reading text in tight windows, left to right, remembering only what came just before. That set-up worked well enough for short phrases. But in longer, more tangled sentences, the models had to squeeze too much context into their limited memory, causing crucial details to...

Marco Schioppo (back) and Adam Parke monitoring the ultra-stable laser at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, UKDavid Severn, Part of Quantum Untangled (2025) at Science Gallery, King’s College London Two nonchalant physicists, one with a wry smile, are monitoring some of the most advanced quantum technology in the UK, an ultra-stable laser at the National Physical Laboratory in London. This enigmatic photograph, taken by photographer David Severn as part of a series of photographs for King’s College London’s Quantum Untangled exhibition, has also been shortlisted for the Portrait of Britain award. “The portrait provides a rare insight into a usually hidden world. It’s as if the viewer has just opened the ordinarily off-limits door to their laboratory,” say...

Sugarcane farmer Vicente Santana works in a field of mid-harvest sugarcane in Tala, Jalisco, Mexico. Photo: Fernando Rangel Bertran In rural Mexico, climate change doesn’t just bring more frequent and extended droughts or increasingly unpredictable rain. It also reveals the fractures beneath the surface: the corruption, the inequality and the everyday barriers that shape who benefits and who is left behind. When the government tries to address a big challenge like water scarcity, the underlying problems rise with it, making clear that climate adaptation isn’t only about technology or policy. It’s about the systems that determine who gets access in the first place. (The interviews for this piece were originally conducted in Spanish and translated for publication.) “I don’t know how...