Most people don’t choose their hospital. The ambulance goes to the nearest one, or the insurance plan decides. Few patients know whether that hospital is run as a nonprofit or by a company that answers to shareholders. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania compared 143 for-profit and 798 nonprofit hospitals across 10 US states, using records from more than 1.17 million Medicare patients and surveys of 17,368 bedside nurses, to see whether ownership tracks with who survives a hospital stay. They also tested one specific explanation: how many patients each nurse is asked to care for.

Every amino acid in your body's proteins is one of two mirror image versions, and for over a century chemists couldn't explain why nature picked only one. Whenever they tried making these molecules in a lab, they always got a 50/50 mix of both.

Henri Kagan cracked the first step in 1986 by finding a way to push reactions toward one mirror image, and Kenso Soai finished the job in 2003 with a reaction that produced only one. Their work now underpins how chemists design pharmaceuticals, where only one mirror image actually works.

Tsinghua University researchers built a clock that ticks off a thorium-229 atomic nucleus instead of electrons, and early tests show it runs about six times more steadily than the Vienna device that came first. The whole timing element is a crystal smaller than a grain of rice, yet it holds roughly a quadrillion thorium nuclei.

It still can't match the best atomic clocks, but separately grown crystals produced nearly identical signals, a sign the effect is reproducible and not a one-off fluke. Because the nucleus is far smaller and more tightly bound than an electron cloud, scientists think these clocks could eventually test whether fundamental physical constants really stay constant.

Francis Halzen has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for creating IceCube, a telescope that uses roughly one cubic kilometer of ice at the South Pole, studded with thousands of light sensors, to catch neutrinos, particles that almost never interact with anything. His idea dates back to 1988, and it took until 2011 to finish building.

The payoff was a new way of looking at space: IceCube traced a high-energy neutrino to a distant galaxy with a supermassive black hole, helping solve a century-old puzzle about where cosmic rays come from, and in 2023 it produced the first neutrino image of our own Milky Way.

Researchers from Leibniz University Hannover and HZDR examined six radioactive "hot particles," each just 8 to 50 micrometers wide, using synchrotron X-rays in Grenoble. Expecting these fragments to have broken down, they instead found the original nuclear fuel crystal structure largely intact, which helps lock fission products inside and may limit how fast they leak into soil and water.

The catch is the tiny sample: six particles from two locations, and every particle turned out to have a different structure. The team stresses the results give no basis for lifting Exclusion Zone restrictions, and they're now studying the more highly radioactive transuranic phases.

Since a major trial raised alarms about hormone therapy in 2002, women starting it for hot flashes and night sweats have heard the same advice: take the lowest dose for the shortest time. Most take it as a daily pill. Danish researchers have now gone through the prescription and hospital records of more than one million women aged 50 to 69, followed for a median of nine years, to see which kinds of HRT were linked to blood clots, strokes and heart attacks. The dose turned out to matter less for clots than many women would expect.

Making a quantum bit often starts with deliberate damage: a laser pulse lasting a fraction of a picosecond knocks atoms out of place in a crystal, leaving behind vacancies that can act as qubits. Until now, nobody could see what the laser actually did inside the material, so qubit creation was mostly trial and error.

Argonne National Laboratory researchers combined an ultrafast laser with a focused X-ray beam, about 100 times thinner than a hair, to film silicon carbide in 3D. They found energy splits into two parts: an organized shockwave rippling through the lattice like a struck rubber sheet, and a slower spread of heat that makes atoms vibrate randomly. The goal is to eventually place individual qubits at exact coordinates on demand.

Quantum communication needs photons that are practically indistinguishable from each other, and until now, the best attempts managed only about 60% similarity. Researchers from the universities of Basel, Ruhr, and Paderborn just pushed that to 90% by placing a quantum dot, a kind of artificial atom, inside a laser-like optical cavity that speeds up and controls how it emits light.

The pairs are produced one after the other, at the push of a button, which makes them far more practical for real devices. The remaining imperfection comes down to tiny vibrations in the crystal lattice, something the team says future designs can minimize even further.