S2
Science & technology
Top 6
Research and engineering from the week, with what each one suggests about running a business.
Science
Kyle Loh's team at Stanford Medicine found that the thinking part of the brain and the part that runs breathing and swallowing come from two separate sets of cells that never mix, right from the earliest days of growth. Published September 18 in Nature Neuroscience, it rewrites a page of the textbook.
2 organs
separate parts, from cells that never mix
Why this mattersResearchers lost years trying to turn one kind of cell into another that it could never become. Same trap in hiring and org design. When a role keeps failing, check whether you are asking a person or a system to be something it was never built to be.
Science
A team at NIST spent years measuring how strong gravity is. To keep themselves honest, a colleague hid a secret number in their data and sealed it in an envelope. They opened it in 2024, and their answer came out a little lower than the best earlier one.
10 years
that the answer stayed sealed in an envelope
Why this mattersThey knew they would nudge the answer if they could see it, so they made seeing it impossible. Do the same with pay reviews, performance ratings and vendor picks. Write the criteria and the scoring before any name or logo is in front of you.
Science
At CERN, a team from Oxford led by Alan Barr smashed particles together and made pairs that behaved as though they were connected to each other, even though each one lasted less than a blink. Einstein doubted this was possible. Published September 20 in Physical Review Letters.
Record
highest energy this link has been seen at
Why this mattersA hundred year old objection keeps failing every new test, because someone keeps running the test. Leadership works the same. Pick one rule your team follows because it has always worked, and measure it once this quarter instead of assuming it still holds.
Science
Andrea Bernardi and colleagues in Chile spotted a planet less than a million years old, which is newborn as planets go. It is about the size of Jupiter and sits roughly 450 light years away. They used the Keck telescope in Hawaii to see it, and published the find on September 16.
<1 Myr
how old it is, which is newborn for a planet
Why this mattersAlmost everything we know about planets comes from finished ones, so a forming one is worth more to watch. Your company is the same. Sit in on a new team's first month rather than reviewing it a year later, when the habits are already set.
Science
Tristan Wagner's lab in Bremen studied a microbe that lives deep in the ocean near hot vents. It takes nitrogen out of the air and turns it into ammonia, the main ingredient in fertilizer, and it keeps working at 98 degrees Celsius. Factories do the same job by burning a lot of energy.
98 C
how hot the water is where it still works
Why this mattersA creature with no factory does what costs the world a large share of its industrial energy. Worth remembering at renewal season. Before you approve a bigger platform, check whether a small tool or a fixed process already does the job you are paying to solve.
Science
Kai Huang's team at the University of Toronto made tiny particles that light up about 150 times brighter than the usual kind. All that brightness lets them tell apart two chemicals built from the same atoms in a different order, which matters when checking medicines and testing water.
150x
brighter than the particles used before
Why this mattersWork that needed an expensive machine and a trained specialist is turning into a laser and a drop of sample. That curve already reached pay benchmarking, policy drafting and first pass document review. Price the software before you sign the next specialist invoice.