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 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.
The International Space Station circles the planet so fast that the crew watch the sun rise and set sixteen times in a single day, a new dawn roughly every ninety minutes
Chemists have demonstrated for the first time how RNA may have copied itself on early Earth — solving a bottleneck that had blocked the origin-of-life field for decades
The danger now is not only that the planet is warming, but that the pace of human-driven warming is accelerating — quietly bringing forward the climate deadlines many people assumed were still years away.
Scientists have discovered that air filters can capture DNA floating in the atmosphere and it can identify wildlife, viruses, and even plants linked to drugs nearby
China produces about 99 percent of the world's raw gallium, the metal hidden inside the radio chips of almost every smartphone, and in late 2024 it banned exports of it to the United States as the chip war escalated
Fold a single sheet of paper just 42 times and it would be thick enough to reach the Moon, because each fold doubles the thickness and doubling grows far faster than anyone expects
Meta's smart glasses companion app was downloaded more than 50 million times before anyone disclosed that it already contained three AI models capable of detecting a face, generating a biometric fingerprint, and firing a notification that read 'Person Recognized'
China approved the world's first commercial brain implant before Neuralink — and the key difference is that NEO's sensors rest on top of the brain's protective membrane rather than piercing the cortex itself
If the Sun vanished this instant, we would carry on in full daylight for about eight minutes and 20 seconds before anything seemed wrong, because that is how long its light takes to reach us
