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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Microsoft’s experimental AI diagnostic system, MAI-DxO, correctly solved up to 85.5% of 304 difficult medical cases adapted from the New England Journal of Medicine — far above the 20% average achieved by 21 experienced physicians under benchmark conditions.
On 29 April 2020, a single bolt of lightning stretched 768 kilometres across Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi in one continuous flash, far enough to reach from New York City to Columbus, Ohio before the thunder from its first end had finished rolling
Satellites can now tell a palm oil plantation from native rainforest by the precise angle its fronds bend the sunlight, reading the near-perfect planted lattice against the chaos of wild canopy — and the European Union's 2023 deforestation regulation now leans on their ability to do exactly that
In the mudstones of a place called Bright Angel, Perseverance detected complex carbon molecules hundreds of times across two rocks, a find researchers called the only detection of macromolecular carbon on a natural rock surface on Mars
In July 2025, the ATLAS sky survey in Chile spotted a faint comet racing through the solar system at roughly 130,000 miles per hour — and follow-up orbit calculations quickly showed it was not bound to the Sun at all, but had arrived from interstellar space.
Neuroscientists long believed you are born with all the neurons you will ever have — in 2025, researchers found newly formed neurons in the brains of adults as old as 78, overturning decades of settled thinking
Shown its reflection in a mirror, a small reef fish scraped at a mark it could see only there, behaving as if it recognized itself - though the researchers stopped short of calling it self-aware
The James Webb telescope picked out 16.5 million individual stars in the Cigar Galaxy — a neighbor forming stars ten times faster than the Milky Way, in a burst estimated to last only a few hundred million years
A 1959 programming language still quietly runs modern finance: COBOL handles ATMs, card networks, bank ledgers and government payments, with an estimated $3 trillion in commerce passing through it daily. Now, as the specialists who understand that old code retire, banks are paying premium rates just to keep it from breaking.
In February 2023, a detector 3.5 kilometres beneath the Mediterranean caught the aftermath of the most energetic neutrino ever seen — a 220-petaelectronvolt ghost particle, roughly 16,000 times beyond CERN’s strongest collisions, with no confirmed source anywhere in the sky.
