The civilization made the most of its technology, but everything has its limits. Mayan society often relied on cinnabar, a deep red pigment that got its hue from mercury sulfide. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. A trio of ancient reservoirs in present-day Guatemala is revealing both the strength--and limitations--of Mayan water science. While the civilization's purification techniques resulted in comparatively clean drinking sources, archaeologists say the unknowable consequences of a commonly used, deep-red pigment consistently subjected the Indigenous population to toxic mercury poisoning .

Climate change and pollution are making rare winter cyanobacteria blooms more common. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. In the Czech Republic, a frozen lake's emerald green ice is giving biologists an unprecedented opportunity to study a strange--and ominous--natural phenomenon. At the end of 2025, researchers at Czech Academy of Sciences traveled to Lake Lipno in South Bohemia to collect and examine samples from a rare cyanobacteria bloom in the dead of winter. Their findings could help better understand a problem that threatens both local marine life and nearby human populations.

We present NewsQs (news-cues), a dataset that provides question-answer pairs for multiple news documents. To create NewsQs, we augment a traditional multi-document summarization dataset with questions automatically generated by a T5-Large model fine-tuned on FAQ-style news articles from the News On the Web corpus. We show that fine-tuning a model with control codes produces questions that are judged acceptable more often than the same model without them as measured through human evaluation. We use a QNLI model with high correlation with human annotations to filter our data. We release our final dataset of high-quality questions, answers, and document clusters as a resource for future work in query-based multi-document summarization.

Blue-green algae sealed within a small container have powered a computer for six months. Similar photosynthetic power generators could run a range of small devices cheaply in the coming years, without the need for the rare and unsustainable materials used in batteries. Christopher Howe at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues built a small enclosure about the size of an AA battery out of aluminium and clear plastic. Inside, they placed a colony of a type of cyanobacteria called Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 – commonly known as "blue-green algae" – which produce oxygen through photosynthesis when exposed to sunlight.

A team of scientists from research centers stretching from Maine to South Carolina will develop and deploy high-tech tools to explore cyanobacteria in lakes across the East Coast. The multi-year project will combine big data, artificial intelligence and robotics with new and time-tested techniques for lake sampling to understand where, when, and how cyanobacterial blooms develop. The research team brings together experts in freshwater ecology, computer science, engineering and geospatial science from Bates College, Colby College, Dartmouth, the University of New Hampshire, the University of Rhode Island and the University of South Carolina. "It is rare to have teams from so many different specialties converge to study a problem like this," said Alberto Quattrini Li, an assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth and the overall project lead. "By working together, we can increase the amount of data that can be collected and increase prediction capabilities."

The scientist from the 1950s has proven how amino acid building blocks can emerge from nothing, so to speak. All it takes is methane, ammonia, water, hydrogen, and electricity, in a certain mixture, at certain temperatures, time and iterations. What was it like 4 billion years ago, when the first amino acids decided to join together to form living cells? The first unicellular organisms formed 100% of the known life in the Precambrian age and for what it's worth, all the following life as well. Stromatolites can still be found today, in shelf areas, always formed by so-called cyanobacteria, which are able to produce oxygen.

As in many other sectors, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are beginning to emerge in the chemical process industries (CPI). While AI-assisted solutions, and other associated technologies, such as robotic process automation (RPA), Internet of Things (IoT), automated drones and quantum computing, are still relatively new for many CPI applications, developers and users alike are realizing their potential benefits for expediting research and development (R&D), predictive maintenance, process optimization and more. Within its Smart Operations initiative, Henkel AG & Co. KGaA (Düsseldorf, Germany; www.henkel.com) is utilizing AI capabilities in its global process operations and supply chain. "We use AI to run efficient analyses of complex data arrays for achieving higher production performance, quick product innovation and scaleup for our self-adjusting production systems," explains Sandeep Sreekumar, global head of Adhesive Digital Operations at Henkel. "Our focus is not only on collecting internal manufacturing data, but also on actively working with customers on data collection opportunities during product usage to make improvements and adjust to changing customer needs," says Sreekumar.

We're coming up on the time of year when people will be testing lakes for toxic blooms of cyanobacteria. Jason Deglint wants to speed up that testing process. Right now, he says it can take at least a few days. "The normal procedure is they take a water sample and they have to ship it to a certified lab," Deglint said. "Then a highly trained professional will sit down at a microscope, and they'll manually identify and count these different organisms."