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 1970, mountaineer Reinhold Messner descended Nanga Parbat convinced a third climber was walking beside him and his brother — a companion that only appeared after 48 hours without food and above 7,000 metres
Salmon returning to the stream where they hatched are not following a map anyone drew for them: they are reading the chemical signature of their birth water on the final stretch, a scent memory formed before they ever reached the ocean
NASA studied pilots taking 26-minute naps during long flights and found their performance improved by 34 percent and alertness by 54 percent, evidence that in aviation, rest could be a safety tool, not a weakness
Cats rarely meow at other adult cats. They save the meow mostly for humans, then learn which pitch and urgency get a person to open the door, fill the bowl, or pay attention
The Kessler Syndrome predicts that a single collision in low Earth orbit could trigger a cascade rendering entire altitudes unusable for generations — and current satellite density has already crossed the threshold the model warned about in 1978
The Pando aspen in Utah looks like a forest of 47,000 separate trees spread across 106 acres, but every trunk shares a single root system and identical DNA, making it one organism weighing roughly 6,000 tonnes and at least 16,000 years old
Miyawaki forests are marketed as growing ten times faster than nature manages alone — a review of the evidence finds that claim partially supported, and most of the others much weaker
Researchers tested an engineered enzyme on donated skin tissue and brought its chemical aging markers down to levels typically seen in 31-year-old skin, a separate test on a 75-year-old donor's arteries cut the same damage by more than seventy percent
Roughly 2% of the global population meets the clinical threshold for giftedness — and the same neural overexcitability that defines it drives sensory overwhelm in crowded rooms
Sea otters carry a favourite rock in a loose pouch of skin under their left forearm and use it as an anvil to crack shellfish, and each otter tends to keep the same stone for years, sometimes for life
