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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
China was effectively shut out of the International Space Station after the United States passed the Wolf Amendment in 2011, so it built its own. If the ISS retires on schedule around 2030 and no commercial successor is ready, China's Tiangong could become the only permanently crewed outpost in Earth orbit.
In the early 1960s, mother bald eagles across the United States were crushing their own eggs by sitting on them, in a continent-wide reproductive collapse caused by a single agricultural pesticide, and by 1963 only 417 nesting pairs of America's national symbol remained alive in the lower 48 states
For billions of years, the Moon’s almost airless surface has been exposed to the solar wind, letting helium-3 become trapped in its soil — making the Moon the most tempting nearby reservoir of a fusion fuel that is almost nonexistent on Earth.
Researchers linked to Washington State University proposed in 2026 that salty, oxidant-rich ice on Europa’s surface could become dense and weak enough to detach and slowly sink through the moon’s ice shell — potentially carrying life-supporting chemistry down to the hidden ocean in as little as 30,000 years under the most favorable model conditions.
Only one spacecraft has ever visited Uranus or Neptune: Voyager 2, which flew past Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989. Nearly four decades later, no mission has returned, leaving many of the biggest questions those flybys raised — about the planets’ interiors, strange magnetic fields, rings, and moons — still unresolved.
Scientists took one of the naked mole rat’s longevity tricks — a gene that helps it produce unusually protective hyaluronan — and put it into mice. The result: the mice lived longer, had less inflammation, and were more resistant to tumours.
A McMaster University AI model called SyntheMol-RL designed a new antibiotic candidate by searching a chemical space of 46 billion possible compounds — a scale far beyond physical lab screens, which usually test hundreds of thousands to a few million molecules.
We tend to think quantum tunnelling is a subatomic curiosity, but in 1984 and 1985 physicists at UC Berkeley showed that a superconducting electrical circuit big enough to hold in your hand could tunnel from one state to another — a discovery that won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics.
In 2018, low Earth orbit still had months of margin: if satellites stopped dodging one another, researchers estimate it could take 164 days before a catastrophic collision. By 2025, after the rise of megaconstellations, that margin had collapsed to just 5.5 days.
A bowhead whale can live for more than 200 years, yet it appears unusually resistant to cancer — and its genome carries genetic changes that may help explain why. Researchers have found signs of enhanced DNA repair in bowhead cells, turning one of the Arctic’s oldest mammals into a serious model for understanding aging itself.
