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 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.
A 2025 solid-state lithium–sulfur study hit about 505 Wh/kg at the cell level, and a Tsinghua quasi-solid-state battery reached 604 Wh/kg, more than double many conventional lithium-ion cells. If either chemistry survives the jump from lab to mass-produced EV packs, it could mean the same range with a much lighter battery, or far longer range without the extra weight.
We tend to think the US is safely ahead in the new Moon race, but China has already put its Lanyue lander through simulated lunar landing and takeoff tests — then fired its Mengzhou crew capsule away from a Long March 10A prototype at maximum aerodynamic pressure, in an integrated abort-and-recovery demo that NASA’s expendable Space Launch System was never designed to match.
We assumed humpback whales had to reach warm tropical waters before giving birth, but a 2025 UNSW-led study found newborn calves as far south as Tasmania — around 1,500 kilometres beyond the accepted calving zone — suggesting some mothers give birth mid-migration and keep swimming north with their calves.
