Founded during the US Civil War to provide advice to the government, the National Academies of Science have become one of the most prestigious scientific organizations. Its primary function is to prepare comprehensive reports on scientific and technological issues, aided by its ability to attract top talent from across the country.

Those reports have not been afraid to weigh in on matters of public controversy and risk offending powerful groups, which it has managed to do without losing the respect of the governmental organizations that fund these reports. But this year, there have been increasing signs that the Academies' ability to dodge political firestorms has reached its limit. Yesterday, a deeply reported story from Politico explained the breakdown between the National Academies and Republican politicians.

The National Academies is preparing an expert report on attribution of weather events to human-driven climate change, and fossil fuel companies are worried it will lead to findings of liability in the many cases where those companies are being sued.

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We tend to view ourselves and the complex cells that build us as a distinct branch of the tree of life from the compact, seemingly featureless cells of bacteria and archaea. But we've found that our genome is actually a hybrid, a mish-mash of genes from bacteria and archaea, along with some that have evolved in our own lineage.

Scientists gradually settled on a simple explanation for this: the first complex cells were the product of a fusion between archaeal cells and bacteria, with the bacteria ultimately evolving into the mitochondria, a chemical-power-generating structure that still retains a bit of its own genome. Over time, many of the other bacterial genes were transferred to the nucleus of what was becoming what we now call a eukaryote, intermingling with the archaeal genes there.

But a new study has taken a careful look at some of the genes shared by all eukaryotes and comes to the conclusion that the reality is a little more complicated and that there were several waves of gene transfers from bacteria. The big picture of a merger between bacteria and archaea is still right, but it was only part of a picture where gene transfers among species were commonplace.

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The scientific community has a plan for achieving fusion power. It involves getting a better understanding of how to control fusion in a tokamak-style reactor using the currently under construction ITER reactor, and then using that knowledge to build DEMO-style plants. But ITER isn't even expected to see hot plasmas until the middle of the 2030s, by which point solar panels will be so cheap that we'll probably all be getting them free in our cereal boxes.

Commonwealth Fusion is a startup that's basically asking "what if we did that, but now?" Its ITER equivalent, a tokamak called SPARC, is over 70 percent complete and is planned to be operating as soon as next year. The company already has a site and customers for the power-generating follow-on, called ARC. Both of those projects are predicated on using high-temperature superconductors to generate an extremely powerful magnetic field that will allow the company to build a smaller reactor, and thus get things done faster.

Years of running plasmas through tokamaks has given us confidence that the basics of these plans are sound. But there are lots of potential devils in the details (otherwise there'd be little need for experimental reactors). So Commonwealth's scientists, in collaboration with the academic community, have recently released five peer-reviewed papers that detail its plans for ARC: what our best models tell us now, and what we'll still need to learn from SPARC to finalize the design of a production fusion plant.

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Just over a year ago, the Trump Administration issued an executive order meant to accelerate the development of nuclear power in the US. While an entire startup ecosystem has developed around the use of different—and typically smaller—reactor designs, only one of them has been fully licensed so far, and there are no plans to actually build any instances of that design.

The executive order directed the Department of Energy to have three different reactor designs reach criticality in a bit over a year. On Thursday, a startup called Antares announced that a test reactor it had placed at the Idaho National Laboratory had reached criticality, making it the first new design to cross this threshold. Criticality means that the nuclear reactions inside the hardware had become self sustaining; it does not mean the reactor had started to generate power.

Antares is one of a number of companies that is basing its design on a new fuel system called TRISO that takes some of the complexity and safety out of the reactor design and places them in the fuel design. The fuel design is based on tiny pellets with a uranium oxide core. The pellets are surrounded by several layers of carbon that can moderate the energy of both the neutrons and lighter nuclei that are released by fission reactions. All of that is encased in a hard ceramic shell that's designed to withstand the highest temperatures that can be produced by the encased uranium.

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On Thursday, President Donald Trump announced his administration's latest attempt to prop up the US coal industry during an incoherent press event that randomly oscillated between energy issues and Trump's fixation with building and renovating monuments in DC. The energy portion of the events was also frequently disconnected from reality.

"Today we're taking historic action to bring down the price of energy and the cost of living for all Americans with the power of clean, beautiful coal," said Trump, apparently unaware that coal is one of the most expensive means of generating electricity in the US.

With wind and solar power getting cheaper, coal has become the second-most expensive way of producing electricity, trailing only the cost of building a new nuclear plant. As a result, no new coal plants have been completed in over a decade, and coal has gone from powering over half the electrical grid to producing only about 15 percent of the nation's electricity. That's before the indirect costs of coal use are considered. It produces the most greenhouse gas emissions per unit of energy, releases dangerous particulates and chemicals into the atmosphere, and leaves behind ash that has high levels of toxic metals.

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With dozens of companies, from small startups to tech giants, pursuing quantum computing, there's a steady flow of results as they try to find a path to utility. We typically focus on new technologies and major landmarks, which can obscure the fact that any big success will inevitably have been built on a lot of incremental progress.

The past few weeks have seen two companies release progress reports on how they're trying to get the technologies closer to general use. None of these represents a major breakthrough, but all are absolutely necessary for the technology to advance. The idea here is to convey the hard work required to move us closer to something useful.

Microsoft does material science

Microsoft is one of the few companies working on topological qubits, based on the distinct physics that occurs when particles are confined. Microsoft's system relies on a thin superconducting wire placed on top of a semiconductor. In superconductors, groups of two electrons form Cooper pairs. But if the wire contains an odd number of conducting electrons—meaning there's a single unpaired electron—it will end up delocalized to both ends of the wire. (Because quantum mechanics is weird.)

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In December, the Trump administration abruptly announced it would shut down the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a Boulder, Colorado-based facility that helps researchers perform studies of weather, climate, atmospheric chemistry, and more. The news came as a shock, given that the government had never identified serious deficiencies in the management of NCAR and its associated supercomputing center in Wyoming.

Nevertheless, the government ordered the University Consortium for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), which manages NCAR on behalf of the National Science Foundation, to help it prepare to transfer the Wyoming facility to a different operator. UCAR sued the government and, on Monday, won a preliminary injunction that places the transfer of the facility on hold.

Is that your final decision?

NCAR is what is termed a "Federally-Funded Research and Development Center" meant to support researchers in the academic community. Rather than having its own research agenda, it provides facilities, equipment, and expertise to support projects that are too large or complex for researchers to pursue on their own. NCAR has been around since the early 1960s and has become a critical resource for the global atmospheric science community.

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Last August, the Trump administration issued an executive order intended to fundamentally alter how grant funding is handled by the US government. Under the system that had made the US a scientific superpower, peer reviewers rated the scientific quality and feasibility of grant applications, and subject-matter experts within the funding agencies used these ratings to determine which grants got funded. Under the proposed rules, political appointees would have the final say, and they were specifically instructed not to "routinely defer" to peer reviewers.

In the interim, the administration has lost many court cases because it turns out that issuing executive orders doesn't circumvent legal requirements, and the orders can be vacated if they lack strong justification. To avoid that same fate, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has decided to merge the executive order with other administration priorities and send it through the formal federal rulemaking process.

The result is a horror show for US science research. Not only is peer review made a secondary consideration, but the new rules would allow any federal agency to cancel any grant at any time based on the vague assertion that it isn't in the "national interest." The document would also ban any grants on a number of culture war topics, limit international collaborations, and block spending on things like publishing papers and attending conferences.

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While we make batteries based on many different chemistries, nothing has approached the massive scale at which we can produce lithium batteries. That scale makes the economics of lithium-ion batteries hard to compete with. Even if we develop a superior battery technology, it's unclear whether we can get manufacturing costs down quickly enough to compete with the efficiency of the lithium supply chain and manufacturing.

The one thing that could change the dynamics is a supply crunch. While lithium is extremely widespread, lithium that can be extracted economically is a different matter. It's cheapest to extract it from brines, and lithium-rich brines are largely limited to South America. We do obtain some lithium from other sources, but it's considerably more expensive.

In today's issue of Science, however, a research team has identified an energy-efficient means of extracting lithium from rocks. The process they've designed uses far less energy than existing ones, regenerates all its starting chemicals, and produces byproducts that could also be sold.

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The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was designed to give us the ability to look at one of the earliest periods in the evolution of the Universe, a time when some of the earliest stars were putting out enough light to ionize the hydrogen that accounted for almost all of the normal matter present at the time. There were lots of ideas about what we might see, but the Universe is full of surprises.

One of the first surprises was the existence of what picked up the moniker "little red dots," which are exactly what their name suggests. After some initial arguments, it became clear that these were early versions of the supermassive black holes that presently sit at the center of almost every galaxy. Now, gravitational lensing has allowed astronomers to confirm that a little red dot is little more than a supermassive black hole without much in the way of a galaxy around it.

Making a little red dot bigger

The little red dot in question is called Abell 2744−QSO1, and gravitational lensing has both magnified it and caused it to appear three times in the vicinity of the galaxy cluster that did the lensing. Based on details in its spectrum, we're looking at the object as it appeared just 700 million years after the Big Bang.

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Last week, the US government announced $2 billion in investments in quantum computing companies, allocating $100 million each to a range of startups in exchange for equity in the companies. Those could be make-or-break investments for many companies that are likely years away from a product that could see widespread use. But a member of the US Congress is now arguing that those deals are illegal, as Congress did not allocate the money for this purpose—instead, it was meant to support public research in semiconductors.

But the biggest chunk of money would go to a company that likely wouldn't exist if it weren't for the government's backing. Anderon will be set up with a billion dollars each from IBM and the government and will inherit personnel and IP from IBM. It will serve as a foundry for fabricating quantum processing units and will contract its services out to IBM and any other company that wants access to cutting-edge hardware.

Is any of this legal?

Zoe Lofgren (D–Calif.), the ranking member of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, made it clear that she is not happy with how the government is using its money to support this technology.

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Last year, the first few months of data from the US grid suggested that fears of a data-center-driven surge in demand were becoming a reality. Demand had risen by about 3 percent, triggering a surge in coal, interrupting what had been a long downward trend. But over the course of the year, both trends slowed considerably.

A year later, all of that seems to be in the past, as the US has returned to its normal pattern: slow growth, with renewables pushing coal off the grid. The one oddity is that hydroelectric production has surged without a corresponding increase in capacity, likely due to unusually warm weather in the western US causing the snowpack to melt early. That may have consequences later in the year.

Pushing fossil fuels out

Overall demand in the US grew by only 1.5 percent in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the same period the year before. Often, changes in demand during this part of the year are driven by weather-related heating demand. But the US had an unusual combination set of weather conditions to start 2026, with the western half baking in unseasonal warm temperatures, while the eastern half suffered a deep freeze. So we'll probably need data from more of the year before we read too much into the small rise in demand we've seen so far.

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On Tuesday, biotech startup Colossal announced its newest development on the road to its announced goal: reversing the extinction of species, in this case, avian species. The development itself is essentially an artificial eggshell, one that allows almost the entire developmental process to occur without the shell. The company transferred the contents of eggs to their specially designed container within a day or two of laying and were able to have normal chicks walk away from it.

Beyond its potential utility for Colossal's intended efforts, the work is personally interesting to me because it may solve a problem I faced in my research days. I'm going to start by describing the research problem that Colossal may have solved, before coming back to what it hopes to use its technology to do—and why the company still has a few key hurdles left to overcome.

Watching development

For part of my career, I studied the development of vertebrates using chickens. While they're less closely related to us than something like mice, the basics of their development are largely the same. And, unlike mice, they develop outside of their mother's body. If you're careful, you can chip away a hole in the egg, perform manipulations on the developing embryo, and then seal it back up with some tape. The chicken embryo will keep developing, allowing you to see the impact of what you've done on normal development.

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