🌎 New Atlas stories of the week

by Omar Kardoudi

Navee, a Chinese mobility brand best known for e-scooters and e-dirt bikes, just revived one of the Cold War's strangest engineering ideas, a craft called the WaveFly 5X that's half plane, half boat, and aimed it squarely at recreational riders.

by Abhimanyu Ghoshal

Combining metals to produce alloys that are stronger or tougher requires extremely high temperatures as part of the process. Researchers in Australia have found that a radically different approach could yield even better alloys with a lot less heat.

by Adam Williams

Picture a tiny house in your mind and it probably looks a little like a cottage on wheels. However, Quadrapol's La Ruche takes a different approach and stacks its living spaces vertically like a tower.

by David Szondy

One for the "why hasn't this been done before?" department: Norway has greenlit construction of the world's first ocean ship tunnel. If the final budget receives parliamentary approval, work on the Stad Ship Tunnel will begin on the country's west coast.

by Bronwyn Thompson

We might be on the verge of a critical breakthrough treatment for pattern hair loss, with a novel slow-release oral drug meeting its significant endpoints in a Phase II/III trial of 519 patients. The next results are due later this year.

by Kerry Taylor-Smith

University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) scientists have developed a form of neurological pacemaker that adapts in real time to a patient’s walking and could address one of the most disabling and hard-to-treat symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.

by Bronwyn Thompson

Definium Therapeutics has announced the strong Phase 3 results of its single-dosed lysergide drug DT120 in treating adults with major depressive disorder. It met its main goal and all key secondary efficacy endpoints in the first trial of its kind.

by Kerry Taylor-Smith

A common laxative may do more than aid digestion: it could sharpen memory and attention in people with depression. This existing drug, currently used to treat chronic constipation, has shown promise in tackling these often-overlooked cognitive issues.

by Mike McRae

Just what causes things to “not all happen at once” remains an open question. So University of Birmingham physicist Giovanni Barontini decided to go back to basics and build a whole new universe to watch time unfold from scratch.

by Bronwyn Thompson

The volatile seismic zone along the roughly 750-mile San Andreas Fault beneath California are "critically stressed" – a level of pressure that has reached its highest point in 1,000 years – increasing the likelihood of a big earthquake hitting the US.

by Mike McRae

An experiment conducted by a team of researchers from Texas A&M University has revealed a healing sequence in mammalian physiology that rebuilds lost skeletal structure, albeit with less than perfect results.

by The Conversation

New research on a pterosaur fossil reveals secrets of the creature’s life, including microscopic inner structures of its bones and traces of its biology and diet. The findings show that molecular evidence can survive for more than 100 million years.