What's up in
Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Two billion years ago, a uranium deposit in Gabon switched itself on as a natural nuclear reactor, running in pulses for hundreds of thousands of years as groundwater boiled away and seeped back to throttle the chain reaction
In 1994, a park ranger rappelling into a sandstone canyon 150 kilometres from Sydney found a living stand of trees known until then only from 90-million-year-old fossils and presumed long extinct, and fewer than 100 wild Wollemi pines still exist in a grove whose coordinates the Australian government keeps classified.
Breathable oxygen has now been produced on the surface of Mars — generated between 2021 and 2023 by a NASA experiment about the size of a toaster, riding inside the Perseverance rover — in the first time humans have ever made air on another planet, opening the door to bringing astronauts safely home one day
Urban birds in a new study let men get about a metre closer than women before flying away, and the mystery is not the distance itself but what the birds are seeing in people that people do not see in themselves
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
