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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
In 1944, Neal Miller harnessed hungry rats in a runway and watched them pull harder toward the food the closer they got — and harder away from the shock, with avoidance climbing steepest exactly where the reward sat, the gradient the British psychologist Jeffrey Gray later mapped to a septo-hippocampal brake
Olive oil flavoured with oregano was recovered from clay jars sealed inside a Greek merchant ship that sank in the Aegean roughly 2,400 years ago during the lifetime of Socrates — meaning the salad dressing sitting on a table at your nearest Mediterranean uses roughly the same recipe
In 1872, Charles Darwin catalogued the facial muscles of suppressed rage — the corrugator above the brow, the masseter at the jaw, the platysma down the neck — and the 'antithesis principle' he proposed still underpins how clinicians read a calm face today
For 400 years, sailors crossing parts of the Indian Ocean have reported patches of sea glowing pale white from horizon to horizon, until satellite imagery finally captured the phenomenon and suggested it is likely the light of trillions of microscopic bioluminescent bacteria switching on at once
Two marsupial species once known to science only from fossils, and thought lost for more than 6,000 years, have been confirmed alive in the rainforests of New Guinea’s Vogelkop Peninsula — a discovery made possible by old museum specimens, rare field photographs, fossil fragments and the knowledge of Indigenous Tambrauw and Maybrat elders.
A Cambridge neuroscientist argues your brain fears not knowing more than it fears pain, and the people most at ease sitting inside that not knowing tend to be among the most creative ones in the room
A molecule called MHC I was understood for decades as the thing that lets the immune system recognize cancer, until researchers found the immune system attacks hardest exactly when cancer switches it off
SpaceX is set to fly its first Starfall capsule Tuesday, a reentry vehicle built to bring up to 1,000 kilograms of cargo back from orbit
In the Amazon canopy a newly named spider called Taczanowskia waska was found mimicking not another animal but a parasitic fungus, copying both how the fungus looks and how it behaves
Darwin's bark spider spins the toughest biological material yet measured, a silk more than ten times tougher than Kevlar, and strings its web across rivers on bridge lines up to 25 meters long
