We’re often told it is “unscientific” or “meaningless” to ask what happened before the big bang. But a new paper by FQxI cosmologist Eugene Lim, of King's College London, UK, and astrophysicists Katy Clough, of Queen Mary University of London, UK, and Josu Aurrekoetxea, at Oxford University, UK, published in Living Reviews in Relativity, in June 2025, proposes a way forward: using complex computer simulations to numerically (rather than exactly) solve Einstein’s equations for gravity in extreme situations. The team argues that numerical relativity should be applied increasingly in cosmology to probe some of the universe’s biggest questions–including what happened before the big bang, whether we live in a multiverse, if our universe has collided with a neighboring cosmos, or whether our universe cycled through a series of bangs and crunches.

The U.S. National Science Foundation has renewed funding for BioPACIFIC MIP — Biomaterials, Polymers and Advanced Constructs from Integrated Chemistry Materials Innovation Platform — a collaboration between UC Santa Barbara and UCLA that provides a unique scientific ecosystem for the United States. This $19.8 million renewal empowers BioPACIFIC MIP to continue advancing the frontier of biobased materials, uniting synthetic biology, chemistry, automation and artificial intelligence to reshape how materials are discovered, designed and deployed.

Recent research has unveiled a new mechanism that explains how carbon dioxide (CO₂) can react directly at water’s surface instead of fully dissolving first. This finding from Cambridge researchers has significant implications for our understanding of ocean acidification and chemical reactions at water interfaces.

The new test can detect even a low concentration of the virus in about two minutes and may also detect identify pathogens as yet unknown.

Studying the physics behind this fleeting fluid phenomenon could improve various industrial processes.

Identifying a mineral might sound straightforward: analyze its chemistry, compare it to known minerals and voilà. But for geologists, this process can be a time-consuming puzzle requiring specialized expertise and a lot of manual calculation. Now, a team of researchers at Rice University’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences has developed MIST — Mineral Identification by Stoichiometry — the first online tool capable of automatically identifying hundreds of different mineral species from their chemical composition using a carefully designed rules-based algorithm.

In a first-of-its-kind breakthrough, researchers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) have turned a protein found in living cells into a functioning quantum bit, or qubit, the foundation of quantum technologies. The protein qubit can be used as a quantum sensor capable of detecting minute changes and ultimately offering unprecedented insight into biological processes.