What's up in
Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Russian scientists in Siberia have brought a 24,000-year-old microscopic animal back to life — a tiny creature called a bdelloid rotifer, frozen in Arctic permafrost since the last Ice Age — and after thawing, it began moving, eating, and reproducing as if no time had passed, in research suggesting that some forms of life can survive in a kind of suspended animation for tens of thousands of years
Singapore's Marina Barrage transformed a polluted tidal estuary into a freshwater reservoir in the heart of the city in 2008, holding back the sea with a dam so the captured rainwater could supply drinking water and tame floods in the downtown core
On Neptune and Uranus, the crushing pressure thousands of miles down is thought to tear methane apart and squeeze the loose carbon into showers of solid diamond, and in 2017 physicists recreated the exact reaction in a laboratory
The Strait of Malacca and Singapore Strait grow so shallow in places that fully laden supertankers carrying a quarter of the world's seaborne oil are required to keep at least three and a half metres of water beneath their keels — about the height of a one-storey room — and squat and swell can quietly shave even that
The FDA has added a new active ingredient to over-the-counter sunscreens for the first time in 20 years, and the reason bemotrizinol matters is not just regulation — it absorbs both UVA and UVB rays, offering U.S. formulas a tool many countries have had for years
Seahorses, giant clams and even the occasional dugong have been recorded in the murky shallows of the Singapore Strait, where conservationists track marine life surviving beside shipping lanes that see roughly 1,000 vessels pass through every single day
The narwhal's spiraled tusk is actually an inside-out canine tooth packed with roughly 10 million nerve endings, and field studies in Nunavut have filmed the animals using it to stun Arctic cod with sharp downward strikes before swallowing them whole
The Singapore Strait funnels roughly a third of the world's traded goods through a channel narrowing to about 3 kilometres wide near Phillip Channel, making it one of the busiest and most pirate-prone waterways on Earth, where ships sometimes queue for days awaiting passage
Sperm whales produce the loudest sound made by any animal, clicks measured at 230 decibels underwater, intense enough that researchers believe a close-range burst could theoretically stun or kill smaller prey and disorient divers within a few meters
West Africa produces roughly 2/3 of the world's cocoa and lost up to 40% of its harvest across two seasons, which is why chocolate is now being grown in a lab in West Sacramento
