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 1977, a radio telescope in Ohio called Big Ear picked up a 72-second signal so strong and so cleanly from the direction of Sagittarius that the astronomer on duty circled it in red ink and wrote 'Wow!' in the margin, and nearly fifty years later nobody has ever heard it again.
The sun accounts for about 99.86% of all the mass in the solar system, which means every planet, moon, asteroid and comet combined is little more than a rounding error.
Naked mole-rats age so slowly, resist cancer so well and survive oxygen loss so strangely that researchers now study them as one of nature’s best clues to human ageing.
Antarctica is the largest desert on the planet, because a desert is defined by how little water falls from the sky rather than by heat, and almost nothing falls on the frozen continent.
The strange truth about today's most powerful AI is that even the people who build it cannot fully explain why it works, which means much of modern technology now rests on tools we can use far better than we can understand.
Some Australian Aboriginal stories may remember coastlines that vanished beneath the sea over 10,000 years ago. Researchers think they could be among humanity’s oldest surviving true stories.
The most unsettling thing about a mass extinction is that it does not always feel apocalyptic while it is happening. It can begin as scattered local losses — a forest gone quiet, a river emptied, a familiar animal no longer seen — until, much later, the pattern resolves into something planetary.
A lost Maya city surfaced almost by chance inside old lidar data, suggesting the jungle may still be hiding whole urban landscapes in datasets no archaeologist has properly read.
The largest insects that ever lived were dragonflies with wingspans of more than two feet, grown in an ancient atmosphere so much richer in oxygen that nothing that size could survive in the air we breathe today
The most powerful AI stories right now are not chatbots. They are the quiet algorithms reading burnt Roman scrolls, trawling through millions of galaxies, and finding things hidden in data no human team could ever finish searching.
