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 early 2000s about one in a hundred published cancer research papers showed signs of coming from a fraudulent paper mill, and by 2022 that number had climbed to nearly one in six
A newly identified order of Australian marsupials survived in Queensland rainforests for more than 35 million years, and it vanished so completely that no descendants of it are alive today
Bees have never been documented nesting inside animal bone in the history of paleontology, until researchers found six nests stacked inside one 20,000-year-old tooth socket
Chernobyl’s exclusion zone, emptied of most human activity after the 1986 nuclear disaster, is now home to abundant populations of wolves, lynx, deer, and introduced Przewalski’s horses—with one major study finding several large mammals as numerous as in nearby uncontaminated reserves, while wolves were more than seven times as abundant.
A 2025 study tested whether impacts could keep Titan’s methane skies alive and found that a 20-kilometre object released up to 1% of the atmosphere’s methane directly, while even favourable impact histories extended its lifetime by no more than 3%, leaving the source of its rivers and rain unresolved
A star was torn apart about 30,000 light-years out from its galaxy's core, and astronomers cannot yet say whether the black hole that did it was flung there or is the last dense trace of a swallowed dwarf galaxy
A tiny freshwater hydra shows no measurable signs of aging, and when Daniel Martinez tracked three cohorts of them at Pomona College for four years the death rate never rose once — over that same stretch each animal had quietly replaced its entire body, cell by cell, at least 60 times
3I/ATLAS, only the third comet confirmed to come from beyond our solar system, carries water with a heavy-hydrogen ratio 40 times higher than Earth's oceans, evidence it formed somewhere far colder than our own star system ever was
A microbe scooped from a Yellowstone hot spring in the 1960s quietly changed the world — the heat-proof enzyme inside it made modern DNA testing possible, which means most DNA evidence in criminal cases and nearly every genetic test in use today traces back to a bug that lives in near-boiling water
There's a river in Spain that runs deep red and is as acidic as vinegar — so hostile that most ordinary life can't survive it, yet it teems with unique iron- and sulfur-oxidizing microbes that give it that color, and it so resembles Mars that NASA uses it to rehearse the search for life on other worlds
