What's up in
Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Astronomers found a third galaxy with almost no dark matter, and all three sit on the same straight line — pointing to a collision that tore ordinary matter loose
Scientists have detected a giant fan-shaped structure buried beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, suggesting the frozen continent may be hiding the geological scars of the breakup that helped separate Antarctica from Australia
A rare meteorite found in the Sahara may be a surviving shard of a lost Moon-sized world — one that formed beside the young Sun, followed a path unlike Earth or Mars, and was smashed apart while the planets were still being built.
Fossil jaws hidden inside Cretaceous rocks have revealed that 100 million years ago, some octopuses grew into giant predators — possibly longer than a bus and more fearsome than any octopus alive today.
In November, a spacecraft that has spent eight years falling toward the Sun will finally settle into orbit around Mercury, a planet we have seen up close fewer times than almost any other in the solar system.
Deep in the Mexican jungle this June, archaeologists reached an intact Maya city hidden for more than a thousand years, where a pyramid temple, carved monuments and silent plazas had survived beneath the forest because there was literally “no road” to get there.
In December 2020, Singapore became the first country in human history to approve the commercial sale of meat that had never been part of a slaughtered animal — chicken grown from cultured cells in a bioreactor by a San Francisco company, served initially in a single Singapore restaurant
A damaged mitochondrion is worse than useless — it leaks and drags down the entire cell around it, like an engine slowly clogging on its own exhaust, until a recycling crew dismantles it
In May 1980, the World Health Organization officially declared that smallpox had been eradicated from human existence — a disease that had killed approximately 300 million people in the twentieth century alone and traced back at least 3,000 years to the smallpox pustules found on the head of the mummy of Pharaoh Ramses V
When a human and a dog gaze into each other's eyes, both of them release oxytocin — the same hormone released between a human mother and her infant during nursing — and Japanese researchers reported in 2015 that this cross-species chemical feedback loop appears to be unique to dogs and their humans and does not occur in wolves
