Science has a knack for dangling hope in front of us like a carrot on a stick. Every few months, a new “breakthrough” claims to have cracked Alzheimer’s, only for it to turn out to be another round of disappointing trials. This time, though, something genuinely promising has emerged, and it comes not from some exotic new molecule but from drugs we already have. Researchers have found that two existing cancer medications, letrozole and irinotecan, can actually reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer’s in mice. Yes, reverse. The drugs cleared away tau protein tangles, stopped degeneration in the brain, and even

Medical research has a habit of overpromising. One week it is miracle cancer cures, the next it is nanobots that will “soon” patrol your bloodstream like tiny mall cops. Usually, the caveat is buried in the last line: it only works in mice, under controlled conditions, and not in any way useful to you. This time, though, something remarkable has actually happened. Scientists in Israel have grown kidneys in the lab that functioned for more than 34 weeks. That is not just cells twitching in a Petri dish, that is a lab-built organ surviving for eight months. (Times of India)

If you’ve ever stared at a pile of plastic bags after a supermarket run and thought there has to be a better use for this than suffocating turtles, good news. Scientists from China and the United States have teamed up and cracked the code. They have created a single step process that turns mixed plastic waste into petrol, with a conversion efficiency of more than ninety five percent. They even managed it at room temperature and ambient pressure, the sort of conditions you would find in your living room rather than a billion-dollar refinery. (SCMP) This is not the usual

Physicists at Washington State University pulled off something that sounds like it belongs in the script of a bad sci-fi reboot: they created a fluid that, when pushed, moves backwards. Yes, backwards, as if it had negative mass. Here’s how they did it. Take a bunch of rubidium atoms, cool them to just above absolute zero until they form a Bose–Einstein condensate (that spooky quantum state where atoms forget they’re individuals and start behaving like a single wave). Then hit them with a carefully tuned set of lasers to manipulate their spin-orbit coupling. The result? When the atoms get nudged,

For over a decade there was no debate. If you wanted the smoothest, most polished mobile operating system, you bought an iPhone. iOS was fluid, reliable, beautifully walled off. Android, by comparison, felt like the wild west. Powerful, yes, but messy, fragmented, and a little rough around the edges. But times change. And if you’ve picked up a high-end Android phone lately, you’ll know the gap has closed. In some ways, it may have flipped. Apple built its empire on refinement, not raw experimentation. iOS didn’t need to be flashy. It just needed to work. And for years, that was

For as long as we’ve stared at the night sky, we’ve wondered about the universe. But the truth is, the biggest mystery has been hiding much closer. Inside our skulls sits three pounds of electrified porridge that somehow makes love, rage, art, war. The brain is the most complex object we know of, and after centuries of poking and prodding, we still don’t really understand how it works. That might be about to change. And the force prying open the doors isn’t human curiosity alone. It’s AI. Researchers are now using algorithms not just to scan the brain, but to

For 70 years, scientists have tried to trap a star in a bottle. Every attempt failed. Plasma broke free, reactors tore themselves apart, and fusion stayed a dream. Until now. AI is learning to tame the chaos. And if it succeeds, humanity will have more power than it knows what to do with. Teaching Machines to Tame a Star At the Swiss Plasma Center, researchers are training AI systems to predict and control plasma behaviour in real time. Instead of slow human guesswork, these algorithms watch the shifting chaos and adjust magnetic fields in microseconds. It’s the difference between a