The dimension at a glance
Pulse
Watch bulletins, critical ecosystems and key players shaping the future
01News
The most recent signals from science and engineering
Double Chooz publishes the first quantitative measurement of residual antineutrino flux
Over 17.2 live days with both Chooz reactors shut down, Double Chooz measures 106 ± 18 residual candidates after background subtraction: the background-only hypothesis is rejected at 5.9 σ. The result is compatible with the 88 ± 7 predicted events; without experimentally separating the sources, the model attributes 44% of them to the spent-fuel pools.
X(2370): BESIII constrains a decay forbidden for a flavour singlet
In a sample of (10,087 ± 44) million J/ψ, BESIII sees no evidence for the X(2370)→K*(892)⁰K̄⁰ submode: its significance is 0.1 σ and the product branching fraction is limited to 2.7 × 10⁻⁶ at 90% confidence. The suppression supports the ‘flavour singlet’ interpretation; identifying it as a glueball remains a model-based conclusion, not a direct detection of bound gluons.
To edit a genome better, first switch off the genes that slow delivery down
Rather than refining the editing tool yet again, a Wisconsin team turned the question around: which human genes prevent the tool from reaching its destination? A screen across 19,114 genes points to six. Switching off just one of them, GJB2, raises correction of a blinding mutation from 5.8% to 46.6% in patient-derived retinal cells, and restores measurable electrical activity to the faulty ion channel in a fraction of the edited cells. Cell-culture work: nothing has yet been tested in an organism.
02Major Projects
The critical ecosystems being tracked, and their progress
Lunar Colonization
50%A permanent return to the Moon: crewed base, resource extraction, space hub
7 · Projects
Martian Establishment
41%An autonomous human presence on Mars: colonies, ISRU, self-sustaining life
5 · Projects
Orbital Space Industry
48%LEO/GEO commerce: stations, manufacturing, tourism, energy, communications
6 · Projects
03Actors
The organizations that build these ecosystems
04Timeline
Each discovery placed at the date it happened, not the date we published it
- To edit a genome better, first switch off the genes that slow delivery down
- The proton's baryon number may not be carried by its quarks — the gluon-junction hypothesis regains ground
- The ovary always keeps the same share of its reserve in activation: 14%, from puberty to the end of reproductive life
- A radial-nanochannel carbon makes it possible to heat a platinum-cobalt catalyst to 1000 °C without coarsening it
- Pig myoglobin in a lettuce leaf: the chloroplast can become a meat-protein factory
- Severe COVID wakes dormant viruses — and one of them marks long COVID
05Academy
Structured, verified knowledge behind the signals
Graphs, degrees, and Eulerian trails
In a multigraph whose vertices of nonzero degree are all connected, degree parity determines whether every edge can be traversed exactly once.
The law of diminishing returns
With technology unchanged, increasing one input while the others remain fixed often ultimately reduces its marginal product; if it is the only variable input, paid at a constant price, and as long as its marginal product remains positive, this decline raises marginal cost.
Comparative advantage
In the two-good, constant-cost model, reallocation follows opportunity cost; if preferences are strictly increasing in chairs over the bundles compared, a price strictly between the two costs enables mutual gain.
The time value of money
An amount means nothing without its date. Comparing sums placed at different dates requires bringing them back to a single date: a flow weighs the less the more distant its maturity, as soon as the reference return is positive.