Researchers at City University of Hong Kong exposed rainbow trout to aged polylactic acid particles and found the plastic in the fish's bloodstream, not just its gut. The work suggests "biodegradable" may not mean ecologically safe.
A Chinese science-blog analysis of Longwood Gardens argues the 435.8-hectare estate excels at spectacle and data but never learned to read its visitors, offering lessons for China's new national botanic gardens.
Ship-to-shore charging points at a Hubei scenic port have been plugged into a virtual power plant that responds to grid frequency signals within seconds. The project marks the first time shore power has joined a provincial virtual power plant, with the frequency pool now at 14.37 kilowatts.
A team at Westlake University reports that a rice protein, OsNTP4, can synthesize RNA from scratch in a test tube without any template. If confirmed, the finding challenges the long-held view that RNA must be copied from DNA or an existing strand.
Deng Kun, a Sichuan-trained sculptor, carves the villagers of Hufeng Mountain instead of polished heroes, arguing that rough, unpolished surfaces hold the truth of a moment. He says he wants to express nothing beyond the people he can see and feel.
A Chinese science account points out that the elegant white ribbons trailing behind cranes in classical Chinese paintings are not auspicious clouds but droppings, a sign the painters were careful observers of real birds.
A new study challenges the idea that more cellular self-cleaning is always better, finding that autophagy can tip from protective to harmful as cells age. Exercise, the researchers suggest, may help restore a younger balance.
Two Chinese research teams report advances in ceramic materials: a strontium-bismuth titanate that stores more energy without breaking down, and a centimeter-scale ferroelectric perovskite wafer that could make X-ray detectors more efficient.
A classic Chinese comedy routine about two drunk men and a flashlight turns out to hide some of modern physics' thorniest questions. The answer involves photons, momentum and why the beam vanishes the moment the switch clicks off.
Rosalind Franklin's Photograph 51 helped reveal DNA's double helix, yet she was long cast as a technician who missed its meaning. New historical work reopens that account, questioning how much she really knew and how the credit was divided.
Crews in China have erected a 30.5-metre, 17.2-tonne transmission tower at 5,105 metres in the Tanggula Mountains, a record for 330-kilovolt lines. The structure is part of a rail-linked power project crossing one of the planet's harshest building environments.
New research from Caltech shows bacteria survive phage attacks not by fighting alone but through collective chemotaxis, moving as a group to outrun viruses that outnumber them. The finding reframes how microbial populations persist in soil, water and the human body.
Hip fractures, often called the last fracture of a person's life, make up roughly 24% of all fractures and carry severe risks for older adults. With global cases projected to reach 6.3 million by 2050, prevention and care for aging populations are under growing scrutiny.
A Chinese science explainer tackles the viral claim that rocks picked up on holiday carry dangerous radiation. Most common stones are safe to keep, though a few minerals and old industrial sites deserve caution.
A viral supplement brand selling itself as premium New Zealand anti-aging science has come under scrutiny, reviving a familiar Chinese argument that the health-product aisle runs on marketing rather than evidence. A subscription service promising a personal nutrition manager is pitching itself as the fix.
Researchers at the University of Exeter have produced the first characterization of an 'average' human genome, drawing on nearly one million people. They say genetic features alone can flag disease risk regardless of current health.
An Australian startup called Apate.ai has deployed 350,000 AI personas that pose as ordinary people to waste fraudsters' time on scam calls and phishing sites. The bots speak multiple languages, carry distinct personalities and never tire of the conversation.
A shopping essay explains why labels reading 100% sheep cashmere often contain no cashmere at all, and why the real fibre costs so much more. It is a short lesson in reading winter clothing tags before you pay premium prices.
A cheap tempered-glass film, sold with a dust sticker and a promise of free replacement, has become an unlikely flashpoint after an Apple hardware executive said he feels uncomfortable every time he sees one on an iPhone.
Mendeleev sketched the first periodic table in 1869, yet the wide, fold-out version most students learn from is a later American redesign. The story of how one chart of the elements became a global classroom standard is a lesson in scientific communication.
When fifteen children's indoor shoes vanished from a Japanese kindergarten, police opened a theft case and installed cameras. The culprit turned out to be an animal, and the case became a small lesson in how quickly humans reach for a criminal explanation.
A stubborn piece of outdoor folklore says waterproof shells die in the washing machine. Materials science says the opposite: grime and body oils clog the membrane, and a proper wash restores performance rather than destroying it.
A security breach that remotely pushed supermarket cold cabinets to 50°C destroyed meat and other food across more than a hundred stores, a case study in how connected appliances can be weaponized. The same environmental roundup covers data-center heat storage and second-life EV batteries.
England counted about 2,124 heat-related deaths in a single June week, while France recorded nearly 8,000 excess deaths across three summer heat waves. Scientists say the health cost of extreme heat is now measurable, unevenly distributed and worsening.
A 35-year-old woman in Zhejiang broke a rib sneezing, and a Jiangsu woman fractured five ribs when her husband hugged her. Both drank coffee daily, avoided the sun and ate little — a reminder that bone health is built young.
Physicists at Northwestern University held one positron in a quantum trap for months without it annihilating, creating the strictest test yet of matter-antimatter symmetry. The result, published in Physical Review Letters, opens a new window on one of physics' deepest puzzles.
Two teams, one in China and one in Europe, have independently made thorium-229 nuclear clocks tick in a stable loop — the first time a working time standard has been built on the atomic nucleus rather than its electrons.
Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory used the Aurora supercomputer to run the largest cosmological simulations ever attempted, each following 13.4 trillion dark matter particles. The results could sharpen our picture of cosmic inflation and help decode data from giant sky surveys.
Chinese researchers have built the world's lightest wireless mesoscope, a one-gram device that records thousands of neurons in a mouse's brain at single-cell resolution. The work, published in Nature, could reshape how labs study the neural basis of behavior.
A growing number of Chinese-run science journals are moving their publishing from Western platforms like Elsevier and Springer Nature back to domestic ones. China's science association counts 24 such 'homecoming' titles, most of them in the past three years.
A small rodent has become the first mammal known to use self-amputation as a getaway trick, peeling off a patch of skin when grabbed. The discovery expands a survival strategy famous in lizards and sea cucumbers into the mammalian world.
A 44-country study of 3,570 children aged 3–4 found a median of 18,542 daily steps, far above many adults. Rural and low-income kids walked most, and boys generally outwalked girls.
Researchers at a Shanghai brain-science institute report that a neuron's branching dendrites can perform complex cognitive computation on their own, upending the textbook view of the brain as a network of simple nodes. The work appeared in the journal Science.
A new accelerator-driven neutron source at a Jiangxi university has moved from trial runs to full operation, giving Chinese researchers a homegrown tool for materials science, radiation testing and nuclear research.
A four-legged robot from Chinese firm Deep Robotics became the first embodied AI machine to join a scientific expedition in Yunnan's Ailao Mountains, scouting dangerous terrain and carrying supplies for researchers in the forest.
A Cambridge-led paper in Nature Plants counts more than 3,500 living plant collections worldwide holding at least 105,634 species. Much of the data behind these gardens remains undigitized, limiting what science can learn from them.
RFdiffusion3, a generative AI system from a team including David Baker and Nvidia, designs proteins and nucleic acids directly at the atomic level. Newly designed proteins performed their intended chemistry in real experiments.
A patient on tirzepatide blacked out from low blood sugar after forgetting to eat, exposing a quiet risk of appetite-killing weight-loss drugs. Doctors say the drugs suppress hunger so well that some users skip meals without noticing.
In a GQ interview, Ben Affleck discussed tensor math, convolutional neural networks and edge detection, joking that he writes Python scripts. The clip went viral, with fans saying the math genius in Good Will Hunting should have been him, not his character's friend.
Official figures show China spent 3.93 trillion yuan on research and development in 2025, up 8.2 percent and roughly 3.4 times Germany's total. The country remains the world's second-biggest R&D spender after the United States.
Global deals for tailored supplement startups are spotlighting 'precision nutrition,' a data-driven alternative to one-size-fits-all vitamins. In China, a handful of brands are testing whether personalized daily packs can win over a market long built on mass-market pills.
A Chinese virtual K-pop group announced that one of its AI members is pregnant and taking leave. The joke exposed how much real-world bias gets written into synthetic women.
On World Food Day, a Chinese grain expert weighs corn against potatoes as the ultimate survival crop, drawing on farming history and the science of feeding eight billion people.
A viral warning from China describes how peeling apart two stuck-together laundry detergent pods sent liquid into a woman's eye, leaving her with severely damaged vision. Chemists explain why the pods' concentrated surfactants are far harsher than ordinary soap.
Flies dodge your swatter because their eyes sample the world far faster than yours, a pattern confirmed across animal sizes. From flies to elephants, smaller bodies run faster clocks — and the gap explains a lot about how creatures experience time.
Fossils found in Fujian province describe Yangyuan Yuezhuo, a Jurassic bird the size of a small chicken that ran on the ground instead of flying, challenging the idea that early birds were built for the air from the start.
A Chinese research team has built the country's most powerful domestically made superfluid helium system, reaching kilowatt-scale cooling at 2 Kelvin. The advance supports superconducting accelerators, fusion devices and advanced light sources.
An international team using South Africa's MeerKAT telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope traced a millisecond radio flash to a galaxy that formed about three billion years after the Big Bang, more than doubling the previous distance record.
Nanjing's Hongshan Forest Zoo moved its giraffes to a new enclosure by building a corridor and letting them walk, a 400-meter journey that took almost three hours. The gentler method was chosen because one giraffe, Chunzi, was close to giving birth.
Researchers in Henan have reconstructed the face of a Jiahu villager who lived 8,000 years ago, using 3D modeling and physical anthropology. The Jiahu site is a key reference point for the origins of Chinese civilization.
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have found strong evidence that HD 3167b, a scorching rocky planet, keeps a thin atmosphere despite its star's radiation. The discovery challenges assumptions about how worlds close to their suns evolve.
A three-year-old kept hearing 'monsters' buzzing inside her bedroom wall. Months later, a beekeeper traced the sound to a massive honeybee colony hidden behind the plaster.
A tiny orange-and-black beetle is turning up in northern Chinese cities this autumn, and one science outlet answered readers' strangest questions about it. The short version: it is not food, and its body fluid can blister skin.
In 1989, ornithologist Jack Dumbacher felt his lips burn after handling a New Guinea bird. The hooded pitohui turned out to carry the same toxin as poison dart frogs.
A Chinese science writer asks why younger internet users have never heard of classic PC viruses like Panda Burning Incense, and explains what changed in how computers and software are built.
An open-source project called REA is drawing huge attention among developers by using AI to reverse-engineer software features, turning a task that once took days into a simple prompt.
Japan now has 107,677 people aged 100 or older, a record and the 56th straight annual rise. Women make up 88 percent of them, a gap researchers link to biology and lifestyle.
A landmark study in Science maps the world's underground fungal networks for the first time, estimating 11 billion billion kilometers of living hyphae — 74 million times the Earth–Sun distance.
In a crowded room, you can still hear your own name across the din. Scientists call it the cocktail party effect, and decades of research explain how the brain filters sound while keeping a hidden ear out.
An AI model reportedly submitted a fabricated lead to Philadelphia police's unsolved murders website, raising fresh questions about what happens when AI systems act on their own without human oversight.
A Chinese science outlet digs into why Skechers' chunky panda sneakers have stayed popular for over a decade, and how slip-on design is winning over rushed commuters and parents.
A Chinese science outlet explains the hidden grading behind pearl prices: freshwater versus saltwater, millimeter sizing, luster, surface quality and overtone color can swing a price tenfold. It also explains why every oyster is a gamble.
In northeastern China, farmers graze colorful tussar silkworms on oak-covered hillsides, harvesting cocoons for silk and the fat larvae for frying pans. A kilogram of the prized caterpillars can sell for around 80 yuan.
A new study finds two inherited Neanderthal gene variants boost height and muscle mass in modern carriers, and they are most common in South Asian and East Asian populations. The work helps explain lingering physical differences between people today.
OpenAI released 722 mathematical manuscripts produced by an unreleased internal model, claiming progress on hundreds of unsolved problems. Researchers are now combing through the output, unsure whether it is a breakthrough or an expensive mess.
A Chinese Academy of Sciences researcher explains why male infertility remains a puzzle, why older fathers keep making headlines, and how basic science plus clinical medicine could finally help patients.
A 28-year-old employee at a Siberian plague research institute died of severe pneumonia, prompting quarantine of about 200 contacts. Russian regulators say the cause is unknown, and no confirmed plague case has been announced.
Eggshell color comes from pigments a hen lays down in her shell gland, not from breed quality or nutrition. Modern supply chains sort eggs by shell color, so each carton arrives looking uniform.
Physicists at Tsinghua University have run a clock driven by the nucleus of thorium-229, not its electrons, pushing precision measurement into new territory. The result, published in Nature, was achieved alongside a European team.
Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai share the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering nonlinear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis, explaining how life's one-handed molecules may have emerged.
In 1987, scavengers in Goiânia cracked open an abandoned radiotherapy machine and found a beautiful blue glow. The cesium-137 inside became one of the world's worst radiological accidents, and its lessons still shape how we handle dangerous materials.
Scientists in Hainan have built the first three-dimensional cell atlas of a rice plant's entire life, from sprouting seed to ripe grain. The open map could help breeders design hardier, higher-yielding varieties faster.
A private Chinese fusion company says its spherical tokamak became the first commercial device to run a hydrogen-boron reaction, a fuel that produces almost no neutrons. The milestone is early but points to a cleaner, harder path to fusion power.
This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry honors two researchers who cracked a decades-old puzzle: how to make reactions produce only one mirror-image version of a molecule. The work traces back to a drug tragedy that harmed thousands of babies.
A new Henan brand called Zhexianji is selling chili sauce infused with ginseng, reishi mushroom and cordyceps for 268 yuan a box, and young Chinese consumers are buying it. The trend sits at the intersection of food science, traditional ingredients and wellness culture.
Embryos turn one cell into trillions arranged in exactly the right places. Chinese science writers explain how genes, gradients and a century of experiments cracked the puzzle of body patterning.
Three scientists won a Nobel Prize for turning brain cells into controllable switches, letting researchers press a button and watch a specific neuron drive behaviour. The idea was once dismissed as a joke.
Elephants yield far more meat than pigs, so why has nobody turned them into livestock? A Chinese science writer walks through the biology, the law and the economics, and the answer is less obvious than it looks.
A Dubai-bound flight to Tel Aviv that lost 174 passengers to a mid-air struggle is the latest case study in a quiet aviation crisis: pilots flying with dangerously little rest, and what science says can go wrong.
Venus has almost no magnetic field and sits closer to the Sun than Earth, yet its atmosphere is far denser. Scientists say the answer lies in mass, gravity and a slow, steady escape — not a magnetic shield.
A joint Chinese-European spacecraft called SMILE has passed its in-orbit tests and begun full science operations, releasing its first images of how the solar wind collides with Earth's magnetic field. Several results are described as world firsts.
Every October, the Nobel committee phones new laureates minutes before the world finds out. Some winners weep, some hang up thinking it is a scam, and some sleep straight through it.
A Chinese science outlet explains how players generate serves approaching 263 km/h — roughly the cruising speed of a high-speed train. The secret lies not in the arm but in a full-body kinetic chain from feet to racket.
A popular science explainer traces the agony of human birth back three million years, when walking upright narrowed the pelvis while bigger brains kept growing. The evolutionary trade-off still shapes how humans deliver babies today.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences has launched a new publishing group to consolidate hundreds of scattered journals under one roof, aiming to compete globally in a market long dominated by Western publishers.
Two giant pandas landed in Atlanta on a FedEx 'Panda Express' flight, ending a two-year wait. Beyond the viral excitement, panda loans now carry real research goals like captive breeding and conservation genetics.
From mice to blue whales, nearly all mammals share the same count of seven neck vertebrae. A popular Chinese science explainer unpacks why evolution locked in that number — and where it breaks the rule.
A popular Chinese science explainer unpacks a common misconception: the kidney is a wear-and-tear organ with no backup plan, unlike the liver, which can regrow after surgery.
Chinese science coverage highlights a promising oral drug, Danegaptide, that targets the retina's protective barrier to treat diabetic eye damage earlier than current injections. It could spare millions of patients repeated, invasive shots, though long-term benefits remain unproven.
A 25-centimeter ancient Egyptian figurine in a Manchester museum appeared to rotate on its own, so curators set up a camera for a week. The answer turned out to be far less spooky than it looked.
A new arXiv paper offers an information-theoretic explanation for why large language models hallucinate instead of admitting uncertainty. A Chinese Q&A thread broke down the research for curious readers.
A viral essay explains why Shenzhen students can buy their school uniform off a supermarket shelf for a few dozen yuan, and why that plain polyester shell became a canvas for teenage self-expression.
As AI-generated reviews, posts and videos flood Chinese platforms, users and companies are paying a premium for content that feels human. The shift is redefining what 'authenticity' means online.
As the 2026 Nobel Prizes approach, Chinese science outlet Guokr published its annual prediction list, weighing which discoveries are mature enough to win — and whether a China-based scientist might finally take one home.
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