Reading long, previously unknown proteins requires recognizing their chemical letters in order. Short-peptide identification is advancing; combining length, accuracy, speed and modified-letter recognition remains a demanding device target.
Perovskite crystals can lase continuously at room temperature when lit by another light source. A directly powered laser diode has now worked at 8 kelvin; bringing that operation to room temperature remains the target.
Rat kidneys have worked after cryogenic storage. Extending that success to a human-sized whole organ requires safe protective chemicals, ice-free cooling and uniform warming, followed by a demanding test of recovered function.
Plasmodium vivax can remain dormant in the liver before causing malaria again. What makes the parasite restart replication?
EBV-related immune activity can rise before multiple sclerosis relapses. Does it drive new brain and spinal-cord lesions, amplify another trigger, or accompany it?
Japanese eel larvae travel from the West Mariana spawning region to East Asia. Which routes and changing depths lead to each coastal arrival?
Endometriosis involves lasting lesions outside the uterus. Which uterine-cell and immune changes help initiate them, rather than result from established disease?
Did comb-jelly neurons share an origin with other animal neurons, or were nervous systems assembled independently from older cellular components?
Aphid attack on one bean plant can change a neighbour’s defences in fungal-network experiments. What carries the cue between them?
Superconducting coils can make powerful motors lighter, but they need deep cooling. NASA has tested major HEMM components; combining its full power, efficiency and low electromagnetic mass remains the motor target.
Can algebraic invariants of every group be assembled from its virtually cyclic subgroups?
Can finite groups detect every nontrivial element of every hyperbolic group?
Does a hyperbolic group whose boundary is a two-sphere act geometrically on hyperbolic three-space?
Can the topology of a finite group’s elementary abelian 2-subgroups detect its normal 2-subgroup structure?
Do non-CM elliptic curves over the rationals always have full mod-p Galois image for primes p>37?
Is every coefficient of Ramanujan’s discriminant modular form nonzero?
Does nonnegative sectional curvature force finite total rational homotopy in a closed simply connected manifold?
Can two distinct surgery slopes on the same nontrivial knot produce the same oriented three-manifold?
Does exponential growth of colored Jones evaluations recover the volume of every hyperbolic knot complement?
Heat carried by atomic vibrations can flow sideways in a magnetic field, even in a nonmagnetic electrical insulator. What microscopic process produces this response in strontium titanate?
Very cold glasses absorb heat and sound through low-energy motions beyond ordinary vibrations. Tunneling between two arrangements describes many measurements, but which microscopic structures supply these states?
An X-ray oscillator could repeatedly amplify light in excited atoms inside a crystal cavity. Atomic gain and fast copper-target delivery are demonstrated; assembling this into a coherent hard-X-ray oscillator remains a distinct device goal.
Do all finite strings of decimal digits occur in π with the frequencies expected from uniformly chosen digits?
Moving a pebble across an edge costs two pebbles. Is the worst-case supply needed on a product graph at most the product of the supplies needed on its two factors?