What's up in
Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
A pet cow has been filmed picking up a handheld brush and flipping it — bristled side against her back and flanks, smooth handle for the sensitive skin of her udder and legs — adjusting her grip by body region, in what researchers call the first documented case of flexible tool use in cattle
Chimpanzees at a Ugandan sanctuary were shown evidence that directly contradicted a choice they had just made — and rationally changed their mind in response, in what's been widely reported as the first time this kind of evidence-based reasoning has been demonstrated in a non-human animal
Earth may not have needed water-rich asteroids to fill its oceans. Oxford researchers found enough native hydrogen inside a meteorite resembling Earth’s original building blocks to explain the planet’s present water supply—suggesting water was a natural outcome of Earth’s formation rather than a lucky delivery from space.
The Golden State Killer was identified in 2018 not by a fingerprint or a witness but by a genealogy website where a distant relative had uploaded their DNA without knowing what it would eventually lead investigators to
A carbon-rich rock from eastern India has been dated to 3.497 billion years using zircon crystals deposited alongside it. Its isotopic fingerprint points to microbial carbon fixation, making it—according to its discoverers—the oldest directly dated rock with a confirmed biosignature and evidence that life was converting inorganic carbon into organic matter while Earth’s continental crust was still assembling.
We tend to think wolves became dogs because humans tamed them, but a 2025 study suggests the story may have begun the other way around — with less fearful wolves feeding near human camps, then breeding only with others like them until two distinct populations emerged: the wary and the tame
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope detected water molecules and freshly produced silicate dust around a dying star seen just 0.55 light-years in projection from the Milky Way’s central black hole—showing that surprisingly fragile material can form and survive within the Galaxy’s radiation-drenched central environment.
After two decades in which standard cosmology favoured endless expansion, a Cornell-led team has calculated that one model consistent with recent dark-energy hints would halt cosmic expansion in 11 billion years and produce a Big Crunch roughly 20 billion years from now.
Researchers from Oxford, Google Cloud and Radboud University gave Gemini just 15 annotated image sets per telescope survey and taught it to distinguish genuine astronomical transients from imaging artefacts with 93% average accuracy — potentially eliminating hours of manual candidate screening while explaining every decision in plain English.
Killer whales in Puget Sound have started balancing dead salmon on their heads again, and the detail that stops researchers isn't the behaviour but the date, because the last time the fad swept the pods was 1987, meaning at least one whale may have carried the memory for 37 years.
