Scientific American

Physicists know that their elegant theoretical description of forces and particles — the standard model of particle physics — must be incomplete, because there are a host of phenomena it cannot explain, such as the existence of dark matter. But observations continue to confirm the model’s accuracy with ever greater precision. Even measurements that seemed to break the mould, such as a discrepancy in the mass of a particle called the W boson, have evaporated under further investigation. Now, an analysis from an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, suggests that evidence for one result that deviates from the standard model has grown. http://spklr.io/6043EMWsT

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) — a major funder of basic research — has restricted the flow of new research grants to a group of elite universities, Nature has learnt. Internal agency documents obtained by Nature’s news team reveal that on 9 April, the NSF’s Office of Award Management (OAM), which finalizes grants and handles their finances, put limits on new funding to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina; Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Princeton University in New Jersey; and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. http://spklr.io/6047EMWW9

The known protein universe just got a lot bigger. A newly released artificial-intelligence tool has generated an atlas of more than one billion predicted protein structures and billions more protein sequences. The database, known as the ESM Atlas, was unveiled Saturday by researchers at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Biohub, a biomedical institute created in San Francisco, California, by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, physician and educator Priscilla Chan. http://spklr.io/6046EMlHO

‘Penguin’ decays from CERN’s latest Large Hadron Collider experiment hint at weird new physics http://spklr.io/6043EMWsT

It's not clear why the National Science Foundation may be limiting funding to certain U.S. universities http://spklr.io/6047EMWW9

The new open-source atlas, generated by an AI tool called ESMFold2, vastly increases the known protein universe http://spklr.io/6046EMlHO

High-bandwidth memory keeps powerful AI chips fed with data, and demand for it helped Boise-based Micron briefly top $1 trillion http://spklr.io/6042EMlBn

Messier 88 is an active galaxy with a central supermassive black hole that is gobbling up gas and dust http://spklr.io/6043EMYA3

As General Dwight D. Eisenhower prepared for D-Day, he needed a forecast. The new movie Pressure shows the tense make-or-break weather prediction that led to the successful invasion of Europe that spelled the beginning of the end of World War II http://spklr.io/6048EMczQ

Humans have chased immortality perhaps for as long as we have known we will die. But merely persisting forever may not be all it’s cracked up to be—especially if you are reduced to just lying there, unable to eat or do much of anything at all. That grim reality may be the eternal condition of severed sea cucumber tissue, according to a new study. http://spklr.io/6045EMwbf By Cody Cottier