What's up in
Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Meta's smart glasses companion app was downloaded more than 50 million times before anyone disclosed that it already contained three AI models capable of detecting a face, generating a biometric fingerprint, and firing a notification that read 'Person Recognized'
China approved the world's first commercial brain implant before Neuralink — and the key difference is that NEO's sensors rest on top of the brain's protective membrane rather than piercing the cortex itself
If the Sun vanished this instant, we would carry on in full daylight for about eight minutes and 20 seconds before anything seemed wrong, because that is how long its light takes to reach us
The most remote spot in the world is so remote that the nearest humans are often not on Earth at all
Bananas sold in supermarkets are nearly all the Cavendish cultivar, genetic clones of a single plant, which is why a fungal disease called Tropical Race 4 spreading through plantations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America could gradually erase the commercial banana just as Race 1 did its predecessor.
Honey recovered from Egyptian tombs sealed more than 3,000 years ago can remain edible because honey’s low water content, acidic pH, and bee-made peroxide chemistry make it almost impossible for bacteria and fungi to grow
For the first space flight in 1961, Soviet engineers locked Gagarin's manual controls behind a code sealed in an envelope on the cabin wall, because they were not sure a human mind would function in orbit.
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a storm wider than Earth that has raged for at least 150 years. Once large enough to swallow several Earths, it has been shrinking for more than a century, and astronomers can now track its changing size decade by decade.
The largest known volcano in the solar system is on Mars — Olympus Mons, a mountain so vast that its base would cover the entire state of Arizona, with a peak rising nearly 22 kilometers above the surrounding plain, almost three times the height of Mount Everest — and it is gentle enough in slope that an astronaut walking up its flank might not realize they were climbing a mountain at all
Time really does run faster for your head than for your feet. According to general relativity, clocks higher in Earth’s gravitational field tick slightly faster — and physicists have now measured the effect across distances as small as a millimetre.
