
What's up in
Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.


A pop-up tag on a pregnant porbeagle shark kept reporting for four days after it stopped moving like a shark — rising and falling through the water at a constant 22°C, five degrees warmer than the sea, from inside whatever had swallowed it

James Webb spotted a bizarre object just 660 million years after the Big Bang that looks like an enormous star but shines with roughly 100 billion Suns' worth of energy — because hidden inside its star-like cocoon is an accreting black hole, rather than a core powered by nuclear fusion.

A trail camera in British Columbia recorded a wild wolf swimming out to a buoy and hauling a fully submerged crab trap up the beach by its rope, then working the bait cup open — three minutes of footage no wild canid had ever been filmed doing

A bowhead whale living today could have been born before the American Civil War. Scientists estimate the species can live more than 200 years, while 19th-century harpoon fragments found embedded in harvested whales provide extraordinary physical evidence of their longevity — making bowheads the longest-lived mammals known.

Dolphins on opposite sides of Australia, thousands of kilometres apart, appear to have independently learned to chase fish into empty seashells and tip the trapped meal into their mouths — two populations, one remarkably similar invention.

A typical AI-focused data centre can consume as much electricity as 100,000 homes. Now companies want to put them in orbit, where carefully chosen satellites can see almost continuous sunlight and dump their waste heat into space through giant radiators instead of conventional cooling plants.

Webb found strong evidence of a Saturn-mass planet in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri A — our nearest solar twin, just 4 light-years away — then the planet seemed to disappear, sending astronomers into millions of simulated orbits to work out how it could have slipped from view.

Dogs assess more than a person’s posture, voice, or facial expression when they meet them; researchers who study canine olfaction have found that dogs can detect the chemical signature of psychological stress in human breath and sweat, meaning they may know your body is under pressure before you say a word

The axolotl can regrow a lost leg, a piece of its heart, parts of its spinal cord, and even sections of its brain with no scarring, and yet in the wild it survives in a single network of canals on the outskirts of Mexico City, where fewer than 1,000 individuals are thought to remain

The blue whale's heart weighs about 400 pounds, beats as slowly as twice per minute when the animal is deep-diving, and pushes blood through an aorta about nine inches across, wide enough to fit a human head but not the crawling child of the popular legend
