What's up in
Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
The little blue pill prescribed today around the world for erectile dysfunction was originally developed in the early 1990s by Pfizer as a treatment for chest pain — and during the early trials, the male volunteers reported a side effect they were extremely reluctant to give up.
Sister Mary, a Catholic nun who belonged to the School Sisters of Notre Dame and died at 101 with her memory and reasoning fully intact, was one of 678 nuns enrolled in a 30-year study of brain aging by the American researcher David Snowdon — and her autopsy revealed a brain riddled with the plaques and tangles of advanced Alzheimer's disease
In 1977, a team of American marine geologists in a small research submarine descended to the seafloor of the Galápagos Rift and discovered something no biology textbook on Earth had ever predicted — an entire thriving ecosystem of giant tube worms, ghostly white crabs, and microbial life sustained not by sunlight but by heat and chemicals leaking out of the planet's interior
For centuries, European sailors told stories of a sea monster called the kraken — a vast tentacled creature that dragged ships down into the deep — and although marine biologists confirmed in the 1850s that the kraken was a real animal they named the giant squid, no one managed to photograph a living one until two Japanese scientists succeeded in September 2004
In April 2026, four Artemis II astronauts flew farther from Earth than any humans in history, reaching 406,771 kilometres from home — breaking a record Apollo 13 had held since 1970, without Artemis II ever landing on the Moon.
In an ancient Martian river channel, Perseverance drilled into a mudstone called Cheyava Falls and found tiny “leopard spot” minerals tangled with organic carbon — patterns that, on Earth, can be left behind when microbes consume organic matter, though scientists still can’t rule out non-living chemistry.
The many-worlds interpretation tackles one of physics’ hardest puzzles — why quantum objects seem to stop behaving like waves when they are measured — by arguing that they never stop at all: every possible outcome happens, but we only experience the branch we end up in.
The most effective anti-aging drug ever tested on a mammal was discovered by accident in 1964 in a soil sample collected from the volcanic ground of Easter Island — and the chemical, now called rapamycin, has been shown to extend the maximum lifespan of laboratory mice by up to 38 per cent
In 2020, something near the centre of the Milky Way switched on and off six times in radio waves, then disappeared from every follow-up search in X-rays and infrared — leaving astronomers with only the name ASKAP J173608.2−321635 and the possibility of an entirely new kind of object.
Complex life may have started before Earth had much oxygen at all. A University of Bristol-led Nature study found that the ancient archaeal lineage behind all plants, animals and fungi began developing complex cellular machinery in anoxic oceans almost 2.9 billion years ago — nearly a billion years earlier than some scientists thought.
