What's up in
Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
The strange truth about today's most powerful AI is that even the people who build it cannot fully explain why it works, which means much of modern technology now rests on tools we can use far better than we can understand.
Some Australian Aboriginal stories may remember coastlines that vanished beneath the sea over 10,000 years ago. Researchers think they could be among humanity’s oldest surviving true stories.
The most unsettling thing about a mass extinction is that it does not always feel apocalyptic while it is happening. It can begin as scattered local losses — a forest gone quiet, a river emptied, a familiar animal no longer seen — until, much later, the pattern resolves into something planetary.
A lost Maya city surfaced almost by chance inside old lidar data, suggesting the jungle may still be hiding whole urban landscapes in datasets no archaeologist has properly read.
The largest insects that ever lived were dragonflies with wingspans of more than two feet, grown in an ancient atmosphere so much richer in oxygen that nothing that size could survive in the air we breathe today
The most powerful AI stories right now are not chatbots. They are the quiet algorithms reading burnt Roman scrolls, trawling through millions of galaxies, and finding things hidden in data no human team could ever finish searching.
The International Space Station circles the planet so fast that the crew watch the sun rise and set sixteen times in a single day, a new dawn roughly every ninety minutes
Chemists have demonstrated for the first time how RNA may have copied itself on early Earth — solving a bottleneck that had blocked the origin-of-life field for decades
The danger now is not only that the planet is warming, but that the pace of human-driven warming is accelerating — quietly bringing forward the climate deadlines many people assumed were still years away.
A single cotton T-shirt requires approximately 2,700 litres of water to produce, the equivalent of one person's drinking water for two and a half years, and the global fashion industry now consumes approximately 79 billion cubic metres of fresh water annually, much of it drawn from regions already facing severe drought.
