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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
A pink world 57 light-years away baffled astronomers for more than a decade. When Webb finally read its atmosphere in research published in 2026, the spectrum only made physical sense after scientists added clouds of salt—a phenomenon predicted in cold worlds for 15 years but never identified this clearly before.
Camera traps at water troughs in the Montes de Toledo recorded an Iberian lynx carrying a freshly killed rabbit to the edge, lowering it into the water, holding it under, then pulling it out to eat — eight events by five different females, and no carnivore had ever been filmed soaking its prey
Lipid biomarkers reveal a sparse microbial community in Mariana forearc mud influenced by hyperalkaline fluids; DNA tests found no usable signal
Everest is somewhere between 15 and 50 metres taller than the collision that built it can explain, and one team's leading explanation is that a river captured another river's headwaters around 89,000 years ago and the mountain has been springing back ever since
Carbon monoxide is best known as a poison, but the human body manufactures small amounts during heme breakdown, and research suggests that at trace levels this two-atom gas helps regulate inflammation and cellular responses to stress inside tissues far below the concentrations that block oxygen delivery
Astronomers identified a dwarf-planet candidate beyond Neptune in 2025 whose orbit lasts nearly 24,000 years and carries it beyond the survey’s detection range for 99.5% of the journey — so finding even one suggests roughly 200 similar worlds may be circling unseen.
Lambs grazing beneath an Oregon solar array gained weight at statistically similar rates despite 38 percent lower pasture production, as higher forage quality helped offset the smaller crop
Wisconsin utilities began bolting nest boxes to power plant smokestacks in the early 1990s, and about 22 percent of every peregrine falcon born in the wild in the state now hatches on a generating station, because a smokestack is the cliff the species ran out of
In parts of Britain and North America, securing the power for a new AI data centre can take five to 15 years as grid queues, permitting and community opposition slow projects—one reason orbital-computing companies now argue that launching servers into space could be quicker than securing land and power for them on Earth.
The universe appears to be expanding faster than our best cosmological model predicts, and nobody knows whether the problem lies in the measurements or in physics itself. NASA is targeting 30 August 2026 to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, whose vast surveys could provide the independent evidence needed to expose what is wrong.
