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Browse our latest investigations, impact stories, and evidence-based progress updates.
National Eye Institute researchers led by Johnny Tam report in Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science the largest open database of cone-photoreceptor inner-segment size in living human eyes: 9,350 cones measured in 28 healthy people aged 12 to 84. Cones run from 5.0 µm near the fovea to 7.8 µm farther out. Women’s cones were about 5% larger. This is a reference atlas, not a therapy.
Garcia-Garcia, Wagner and colleagues at NIH NINDS report in Nature (26 Aug 2026) that cerebellar granule cells keep two learned skills apart by coherently rotating low-dimensional trajectories — about 54° cross-task versus ~19° in premotor cortex — while preserving each skill’s geometry. Nine mice; 18 cross-task session pairs. Not a human therapy.
Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University transmitted entangled photons across a 13-mile (21 km) free-space optical link between the Quantum Watchtower and Quantum Lighthouse — the first permanent U.S. link of its kind, adding a wireless leg to a 161-mile, eight-node quantum network. Daytime demo 21 Aug 2026; entangled detection logged 19 Aug at 12:26 a.m. ET.
Reuters (28 July 2026) named Shanghai Aishengna as the state-backed firm mass-producing China's first homegrown immersion DUV lithography tools — about five this year, roughly 20 in 2027 — for SMIC, Hua Hong and CXMT. That is real localization of mature-node scanners. It is not EUV. Goldman Sachs (24 Aug 2026) still has China 34% short of advanced-chip self-sufficiency in 2035.
Kraft, Joshi, Kraus, Roos, Zoller and colleagues report in Physical Review X (published 13 Aug 2026; IQOQI note 18 Aug) a bounded-error quantum simulation protocol demonstrated on trapped-ion chains of 10 and 51 40Ca+ ions. The 51-ion learning problem has 14,229 parameters. Error bars are a calibration layer for analog simulators, not fault-tolerant computing.
Saxena et al. in Science Advances (19 Aug 2026) combine LRO Diviner temperatures and LOLA illumination with published UV lethal doses for five Earth microbes. At three Artemis III candidate sites, Aspergillus niger could persist on about 3% of mapped non-PSR ground for at least seven Earth days. Survival is not growth. The Moon still lacks liquid water at the surface.
