What's up in
Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
In 1964, a quiet British physicist named Peter Higgs proposed the existence of an invisible field permeating the entire universe — the thing that gives every particle of matter its mass — and it took another 48 years before scientists at CERN finally proved he was right, in a discovery that completed our most fundamental theory of how the universe is built
The Human Genome Project was declared complete in 2003 — but about 8% of human DNA was still missing, including some of the regions most critical to chromosome stability and immunity, and it took another nineteen years to finally read it all
There is a spot in the South Pacific so far from any coastline that when the International Space Station passes overhead, the nearest human beings may be the astronauts in orbit — not anyone on land.
China has just sent stem-cell-grown structures resembling early human embryos to its space station — the first experiment of its kind in orbit — to find out whether humans can actually reproduce beyond Earth
A new meta-analysis of 27 studies just changed what I'm most afraid of about sugar — it turns out the craving isn't the worst part
Paleontologists in New Mexico have just dug up a two-legged, beak-mouthed reptile that looks almost exactly like a small dinosaur — except it lived more than a hundred million years before any dinosaur evolved that body plan, and it wasn't a dinosaur at all, but a distant cousin of modern crocodiles
The Bronze Age civilization that built the city of Akrotiri on Santorini around 1600 BCE appears to have known a volcanic eruption was coming and evacuated almost everyone before it happened — archaeologists have found no bodies in the ruins, just abandoned belongings — and to this day nobody fully understands what warning signs they read, or where they went after they left
In 1816, a French physician named René Laennec, embarrassed to press his ear against the chest of a young female patient, rolled up a sheet of paper into a tube and listened through it instead — and that improvised paper cylinder, which let him hear her heart more clearly than direct contact had, became the original prototype for the stethoscope and quietly reshaped two centuries of medicine
The largest known organism on Earth isn't a whale or a tree — it's a single fungus growing underground in Oregon's Malheur National Forest, covering nearly four square miles, mostly invisible, estimated to be between two and eight thousand years old and slowly killing the forest above it from beneath
For more than thirty years after his death in 1955, Albert Einstein's brain was kept in a series of jars in the basement of a Kansas pathologist who had removed it during the autopsy without permission — and when researchers finally examined it in the 1980s and 1990s, one study found that a specific region called the inferior parietal lobule was about fifteen percent wider than the average brain
