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SciBeat
Sunday, October 18, 202630 plates todayVol. 19
China Spent 780 Trillion Won on R&D Last Year
China's R&D spending hit 780 trillion won last year, with basic science and university funding both growing by double digits — a signal, but not yet a trend.
Plates of the day
Crystal Flaws Lose Energy in Predictable Ways, Study Finds
Scientists can now better predict how tiny flaws in diamond and silicon carbide shed energy — a step toward using these defects as building blocks fo…
NASA Finds 40% More Amazon Fires Than Satellites Officially Show
NASA-backed researchers found about 40% more fires around Santarém than official satellite counts show, as El Niño drought pushes the Amazon toward a…
Two Supermassive Black Holes Could Collide in Just 100 Years
A hidden second jet at the heart of Mrk 501 reveals two supermassive black holes orbiting every 121 days — and they may merge in as little as 100 yea…
Cambridge tests 39 sweeteners against gut bacteria — and finds surprises
Cambridge scientists tested 39 sweeteners against 25 gut bacteria and found about 29 altered bacterial growth. Sweetener-drug combos produced 100-plu…
Red Meat Sugar Linked to 63% Higher Type 2 Diabetes Risk
Adults with the highest intake of Neu5Gc, a sugar in beef and lamb, faced a 63% higher type 2 diabetes risk in a French study of 89,953 people tracke…
Third Form of Magnetism Earns Three Physicists 2026 Europhysics Prize
Altermagnetism, a third form of magnetism hidden for over a century, has won three physicists the 2026 Europhysics Prize and opened a new frontier in…
Physicists Build a Fractional Fermi Sea, a New State of Quantum Matter
Ultracold cesium atoms, cycled between extreme attraction and repulsion, form a highly excited yet orderly "fractional Fermi sea" that defies standar…
Later plates · Latest
- SpaceX Launch Paints a Giant Jellyfish Across the Eastern U.S. Sky
- Male and Female Skin Stem Cells Follow Different Rules, Study Finds
- 7,300-Year-Old Eruption Devastated Japan — but Some Communities Grew
- When Humans Vanished, Biodiversity Dropped 40% — Black Death Study
- An 80-Year Research Pact Between Washington and Universities, Shaken
- Japan's MMX Mission Launches Monday to Grab Soil From Mars' Moon
- Eli Lilly Trial Reports Significant Weight Loss With Retatrutide
- Canada's New Budget Courts US Researchers, Signals Science Push