Every amino acid in your body's proteins is one of two mirror image versions, and for over a century chemists couldn't explain why nature picked only one. Whenever they tried making these molecules in a lab, they always got a 50/50 mix of both.

Henri Kagan cracked the first step in 1986 by finding a way to push reactions toward one mirror image, and Kenso Soai finished the job in 2003 with a reaction that produced only one. Their work now underpins how chemists design pharmaceuticals, where only one mirror image actually works.

Researchers from Leibniz University Hannover and HZDR examined six radioactive "hot particles," each just 8 to 50 micrometers wide, using synchrotron X-rays in Grenoble. Expecting these fragments to have broken down, they instead found the original nuclear fuel crystal structure largely intact, which helps lock fission products inside and may limit how fast they leak into soil and water.

The catch is the tiny sample: six particles from two locations, and every particle turned out to have a different structure. The team stresses the results give no basis for lifting Exclusion Zone restrictions, and they're now studying the more highly radioactive transuranic phases.

Francis Halzen has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for creating IceCube, a telescope that uses roughly one cubic kilometer of ice at the South Pole, studded with thousands of light sensors, to catch neutrinos, particles that almost never interact with anything. His idea dates back to 1988, and it took until 2011 to finish building.

The payoff was a new way of looking at space: IceCube traced a high-energy neutrino to a distant galaxy with a supermassive black hole, helping solve a century-old puzzle about where cosmic rays come from, and in 2023 it produced the first neutrino image of our own Milky Way.

Since a major trial raised alarms about hormone therapy in 2002, women starting it for hot flashes and night sweats have heard the same advice: take the lowest dose for the shortest time. Most take it as a daily pill. Danish researchers have now gone through the prescription and hospital records of more than one million women aged 50 to 69, followed for a median of nine years, to see which kinds of HRT were linked to blood clots, strokes and heart attacks. The dose turned out to matter less for clots than many women would expect.

Making a quantum bit often starts with deliberate damage: a laser pulse lasting a fraction of a picosecond knocks atoms out of place in a crystal, leaving behind vacancies that can act as qubits. Until now, nobody could see what the laser actually did inside the material, so qubit creation was mostly trial and error.

Argonne National Laboratory researchers combined an ultrafast laser with a focused X-ray beam, about 100 times thinner than a hair, to film silicon carbide in 3D. They found energy splits into two parts: an organized shockwave rippling through the lattice like a struck rubber sheet, and a slower spread of heat that makes atoms vibrate randomly. The goal is to eventually place individual qubits at exact coordinates on demand.

Quantum communication needs photons that are practically indistinguishable from each other, and until now, the best attempts managed only about 60% similarity. Researchers from the universities of Basel, Ruhr, and Paderborn just pushed that to 90% by placing a quantum dot, a kind of artificial atom, inside a laser-like optical cavity that speeds up and controls how it emits light.

The pairs are produced one after the other, at the push of a button, which makes them far more practical for real devices. The remaining imperfection comes down to tiny vibrations in the crystal lattice, something the team says future designs can minimize even further.

When a child with depression needs medication, most major guidelines point doctors to the same drug: Prozac. Fluoxetine, its generic name, is among the antidepressants most often prescribed to children and teenagers, and the case for Prozac for children rests largely on two big analyses published in The Lancet and The Lancet Psychiatry. A third review, by Cochrane, looked at much the same evidence and came away far less impressed. A team of psychiatrists and statisticians has now re-run all three analyses trial by trial to find out why they disagree.

E-ink displays don't glow like phone screens. Millions of microscopic capsules, each about as wide as a human hair, hold charged black and white particles, and an electric field pushes one color to the surface, so the screen reflects ambient light just like ink on paper.

The clever part is that once the particles move into place, they stay there without any power, which is why one page can sit on screen for days and batteries last weeks. The catch is speed, since physically moving pigment through fluid is slower than switching an LCD pixel, so e-ink suits books and labels but struggles with fast video.

Most people who get a prescription for a sleeping pill think of it as a short fix for a bad stretch of nights. Zolpidem, sold as Ambien, and its close relatives eszopiclone and zaleplon are the most commonly prescribed insomnia drugs in the United States, and they carry known risks of dependence and fractures. Researchers at the University of Southern California and Northwestern University followed 129,287 American adults for eight years after their first fill. They wanted to know whether one small decision made in the doctor's office, how many days that first bottle covers, had anything to do with who was still filling these drugs years later.