Gov. Maura Healey signs new cannabis law. What to know

Governor Maura Healey signed a new cannabis law on Sunday that will expand business opportunities and increase the amount of cannabis adults can legally possess.
The law increases the legal possession limit for adults to two ounces and doubles the number of retail licenses business owners can hold from three to six. It will also reduce the number of members on the Cannabis Control Commission from five to three.
The law also authorizes new license categories, including on-site consumption, event-based use and research licenses.
The ne

Nearly 7 Million Bitcoin is Sitting in a Quantum Minefield, Including Satoshi’s

On-chain reports suggest that almost 6.7 million Bitcoin are currently sitting in quantum-vulnerable addresses. These tokens have not moved in years, and some have not moved for over a decade. A portion of these coins is also believed to belong to Satoshi Nakamoto.
Currently, these coins are the most valuable target in the history of financial crime.
A new whitepaper from Google Quantum AI, published on March 30, 2026, maps the precise scale of Bitcoin's quantum vulnerability for the first time.
The research

As Western heat wave ends, scientists try to make sense of its length and intensity

The scorching spring heat dome that baked the West for well over a week has finally moved along, after setting more than 1,500 temperature records across 11 states, according to the research group Climate Central.
In its wake, climate scientists, irrigation managers and local officials are taking stock of a looming water crisis and trying to make sense of just how exceptional the heat wave turned out to be. Even before the high temperatures arrived, Western states were reporting some of their weakest snowpa

‘Inoculation’ helps people spot political deepfakes, study finds

Informing people about political deepfakes through text-based information and interactive games both improve people’s ability to spot AI-generated video and audio that falsely depict politicians, according to a study my colleagues and I conducted.
Although researchers have focused primarily on advancing technologies for detecting deepfakes, there is also a need for approaches that address the potential audiences for political deepfakes. Deepfakes are becoming increasingly difficult to identify, verify and combat as artificial

Consumers down on the economy, as gas prices and mortgages surge due to war

Americans are feeling gloomier about the economy in recent weeks, as the disruptions caused by the Iran war send gas prices skyrocketing and mortgage rates climbing.
Consumer sentiment, a measurement of Americans’ economic perceptions, fell nearly 6 percent to its lowest level since December, according to a closely watched index from the University of Michigan. Sentiment about the economy had been trending upward in the initial weeks of research, the survey’s early results found, but dipped significantly after the

Institutions are scooping up Bitcoin again as Iran war sparks $2.3bn ETF buying spree

James **** erfill says companies used to treat him like a dirty secret.
As CoinShares’ head of research, one of his jobs is to meet prospective institutional investors and try to convince them to trust the **** et management firm to invest their money into cryptocurrencies.
Five years ago, that was a tall order.
“We would generally meet them in the corner of some coffee shop because they were worried about the image it would portray of them meeting some crypto guys,” **** erfill told DL News.
But thing

What’s next for Bitcoin price amid Iran war and oil prices surge

Bitcoin’s price dipped hard on Thursday as war in the Middle East escalated, sparking fears of an energy crisis, before rebounding.
Iran hit Qatar’s main gas plant, Ras Laffan, causing billions of dollars in damage. The strike came after the Federal Reserve on Wednesday dampened investor hopes of interest rate cuts later this year.
“We’re seeing a double-whammy for risk ****** ets,” David Lawant, Anchorage Digital’s head of research, told DL News. “Crypto isn’t immune to these macro headwinds.”
Bitcoin dropped to under $69,

You probably agree with the animals on which bird calls, frog noises and cricket chirps are most attractive – new research

Animals do all sorts of things to attract each other as potential mates. Many birds, for example, produce feathers with elaborate color patterns – from the iridescent plumage of many hummingbirds to the famously brilliant tail of a peacock. Charles Darwin, an early pioneer in the theory of evolution, saw these colors and concluded that they exist because other birds find them attractive.
But this raised a peculiar question: Why did Darwin himself find these colors beau

NASA rover detects some of the oldest evidence of water flowing on Mars

By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON, March 18 (Reuters) - Using ground-penetrating radar, NASA's Perseverance rover has detected underground remains of an ancient river delta on Mars in some of the oldest evidence yet obtained showing how water once flowed on the surface of Earth's planetary neighbor.
Researchers ‌said the six-wheeled rover revealed geological features up to 115 feet (35 meters) underground while traversing 3.8 miles (6.1 km) of terrain inside Jezero Crater, ‌an area in the Martian northern hemisphere believed

X-ray ****** ecraft watches monster black hole wake up and fire cosmic bullets at starburst galaxy

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The joint NASA and ****** an Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission XRISM has spotted a monster black hole awakening in a distant "starburst" galaxy.
The research is revolutionary to black hole science, because it represents the first observation of the exact stage at which "winds" from a black hole begin to shape an entire galaxy.
Thus, the "switching on" of this supermassive black h

How fast is the universe expanding? Astronomers may be one step closer to resolving 'Hubble trouble'

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The local universe may be expanding more slowly than previously thought, scientists have found. The discovery, made in two separate pieces of research, could relieve one of the most troubling headaches in cosmology, the Hubble tension.
The Hubble constant — named after Edwin Hubble, the astronomer who found in the early 1900s that the universe is expanding — is the rate at which that expa

Oldest known whale recording could unlock mysteries of the ocean

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — A haunting whale song discovered on decades-old audio equipment could open up a new understanding of how the huge animals communicate, according to researchers who say it’s the oldest such recording known.
The song is that of a humpback whale, a marine giant beloved by whale watchers for its docile nature and spectacular leaps from the water, and was recorded by scientists in March 1949 in Bermuda, said researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Falmouth, Massachusetts.
Just as significant

From rockets to cancer research, here's how the number pi is embedded in our lives

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Math nerds and dessert enthusiasts unite to celebrate Pi Day every March 14, the date that represents the first three digits of the mathematical constant pi.
Representing the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, pi is approximately equal to 3.14159 — but its digits go on forever. In school, you might have used it to calculate the area of a circle or the volume of a cylinder. But the applications of pi are endless and part of every corner of our world.
The holiday was created

Older Humpbacks Prove Better at Wooing Mates

As humpback whale populations recover, researchers are gaining a richer understanding of these wondrous creatures. A new study suggests it may take years for humpbacks to learn how to successfully serenade a mate.
Before being decimated by whaling a century ago, there were around 120,000 humpbacks globally, but over decades their numbers were reduced by as much as 95 percent. Since countries agreed to ban commercial whaling in 1986, humpback whales have been rebounding and have nearly recovered in some regions.
For a new study, researchers foll

Why don't more Tatooine-like exoplanets exist in our Milky Way galaxy? Astronomers might have an answer

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It's one of the most instantly recognizable scenes in cinematic history: Luke Skywalker gazes at a double sunset to the haunting melody of a mournful French horn. And while "Star Wars" may take place in a galaxy far, far away, planets orbiting binary stars actually do exist in the Milky Way. Yet mysteriously, there are not as many as scientists expect — and new research might explain wh

NASA launches twin rocket missions from Alaska to study mysterious black auroras

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NASA launched two rockets from Alaska this week to learn more about the electrical "circuitry" within auroras, the colorful light shows that occur when solar wind collides with Earth's atmosphere.
The missions saw two suborbital sounding rockets launch from the Poker Flat Research Range near Fairbanks, Alaska loaded with scientific equipment that will fly into the atmosphere for a short period of time to gat

Sell-side pressure for Bitcoin, which last week brought the world’s largest crypto to its lowest point since President Donald Trump was elected for a second term, has begun to abate.
Analysts point to increasing demand from large buyers, the balance of aggressive buying and selling, and the percentage of supply in profit as evidence that the drawdown could be running out of steam.
“From the perspective of price action and on-chain distribution, the pace of the decline is indeed decelerating,” Tim Sun, senior researcher at HashKey Group, told Decrypt. “However, we have yet to see a signal for

New climate report says 41 states are getting warmer by the decade

Researchers at two Spanish universities have found that 84% of the contiguous U.S. states have shown signs of warming over the last 70 or so years, which is more than previously suggested.
In a report published last week in the journal PLOS Climate, the researchers found that 41 U.S. states have gotten warmer since the middle of the last century. Alaska and Hawaii weren't included in the study.
The states' warming patterns weren't uniform, Jesús Gonzalo, an economist and professor at the University of Charles III in Madrid

A US-led research team has verified the first Mediterranean mass grave of the world’s earliest recorded pandemic, providing stark new details about the plague of Justinian that killed millions of people in the Byzantine empire between the sixth and eighth centuries.
The findings, published in February’s Journal of Archaeological Science, offer what researchers say is a rare empirical window into the mobility, urban life and vulnerability of citizens affected by the pestilence.
DNA taken from bodies at a mass burial ground at Jerash in modern-day Jordan show the grave represented “a single mo

Scientists have discovered an unexpected source of air pollution caused by planes, and it has nothing to do with their exhaust.
A new study, published in the journal Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology, examined the presence of Tire Wear Particles at the Milan Linate Airport in Italy.
Tire wear particles, or TWPs, are non-exhaust pollutants that shed from tires as they move across pavement.
Researchers found that the airport was a significant local source of hazardous organic compounds, specifically benzothiazole (BTH) components, which can be released from TWPs.
They discovered seve

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The world's oceans are breaking climate records, with ocean heat content last year reaching its highest level on record.
This new discovery follows a decades-long trend of ocean warming that shows no sign of slowing down.
A large international team of researchers published a paper about record ocean heat measurements in 2025. Led by the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the scientists gained a better understanding of ocean warming and det

An evolutionary development is raising alarms among scientists: Two of the world's most destructive crop pests have begun interbreeding — creating destructive hybrids that could threaten food supplies.
According to New Scientist, researchers discovered that two notorious agricultural pests — the cotton bollworm and the corn earworm — have successfully interbred in Brazil, exchanging genes that make them more resistant to pesticides in genetically modified crops.
Both insects are moth species whose caterpillars feed on crops. The corn earworm is native to the Americas and attacks corn, tomato

Here's some science trivia for you: unlike the inner retina in most animals (including us), birds' inner retinas function without oxygen. And now, researchers led by a team from Aarhus University in Denmark have figured out how.
In the retinas of almost all vertebrates, the oxygen required to convert glucose into sufficient amounts of energy for cells to function is delivered courtesy of red blood cells.
Not so with birds: there are no blood vessels in the retina, so oxygen can only arrive by diffusion through the surface, making the inner retina anoxic (without oxygen).
Cells can squeeze e

Super-Earth exoplanets may have built-in magnetic protection from churning magma — and that's good news for life

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"Super-Earth" exoplanets may have an in-built way to protect themselves from harmful radiation, giving any potential life on such worlds a better chance of surviving, according to recent research.
Super-Earths, worlds larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, are

Several Psychiatric Disorders Share The Same Root Cause, Study Suggests

Researchers have discovered that eight different psychiatric conditions share a common genetic basis.
A study published in early 2025 pinpointed specific variants among those shared genes, showing how they behave during brain development.
The US team found many of these variants remain active for extended periods, potentially influencing multiple developmental stages – and offering new targets for treatments that could address several disorders at once.
Related: Study Traces Autism's Origin to The Rise of Human Intel

NEW YORK (AP) — Two artifacts found at a lake shore in Greece are the oldest wooden tools to be uncovered so far and date back 430,000 years.
One is a spindly stick about 2 1/2 feet (80 centimeters) long that could have been used for digging in the mud. The other is a smaller, more mysterious handheld chunk of willow or poplar wood that may have been used to shape stone tools, according to research published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Scientists think ancient humans wielded a whole litany of tools made from stone, bone and wood. But it's particular

Climate change is shifting the weather patterns of Earth in ways that are far-reaching and long-lasting, and a new study details a noticeable rise in extreme weather events in the Arctic, prompted by rising global temperatures.
The study, from an international team of researchers who ****** yzed decades of data, declares that a "new era" of extreme weather events is now underway in the northernmost region of the planet.
It's a major move into unprecedented climate conditions, the researchers say, likely to have a significant impact on Arctic plants and wildlife, and on the people who call th

A box full of viruses and bacteria has completed its return trip to the International **** e Station, and the changes these 'bugs' experienced in their travels could help us Earthlings tackle drug-resistant infections.
A team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and US biotech company Rhodium Scientific Inc. pitted Escherichia coli bacteria against its viral arch-nemesis, the T7 bacteriophage. This pair has been locked in an evolutionary 'arms race' for as long as we've been looking, but never in microgravity – until they were sent to the ISS in 2020.
Related: The ISS Has

Scientists Intrigued by Unfamiliar Life Form

It’s a plant! It’s a fungus! It’s… an entirely new type of lifeform hitherto unknown to science?
That appears to be the case for a puzzling, spire-shaped organism that lived over 400 million years ago, according to a new study published in the journal Science Advances. After ****** yzing its internal structures, the authors argue that the mystifying ancient beings known as prototaxites don’t belong to any of the existing biological kingdoms.
“It feels like it doesn’t fit comfortably anywhere,” Matthew Nelsen, a senior research scientist at the

This month, AFP reported from OceanXplorer, a high-tech marine research vessel owned by billionaire-backed non-profit OceanX, as it studied seamounts off Indonesia.
The ship pairs advanced scientific research with high-end media content to make marine biology and conservation accessible.
- A one-stop shop -
A former oil exploration ship, OceanXplorer belongs to OceanX, which was founded by wealthy investor Ray Dalio and his son Mark.
It was retrofitted with everything from laboratories for genetic sequencing to helicopters for aerial surveys.

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