What's up in
Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Mars is a frozen desert and Venus a 465-degree pressure cooker, yet both atmospheres are about 96% carbon dioxide—and because neither planet has a global magnetic field, both are still leaking atmospheric particles into space under the solar wind’s assault.
A newly discovered dwarf-planet candidate beyond Pluto takes roughly 25,000 years to orbit the Sun and is detectable for only about 0.5% of that journey — making its chance discovery in archival images evidence that hundreds of similar worlds may remain hidden in the outer solar system.
A TikTok video from the India-Nepal border area showed a pale fish with reduced eyes that had come out of a borewell, and the researchers who went looking hand-pumped more than 15 of them in about a week to get three specimens, enough to describe what they report as the first subterranean fish from the alluvial aquifers of the Indo-Gangetic Plain
One unprotected gunshot can be loud enough to permanently injure the inner ear — damaging the tiny hair cells that turn vibration into sound, cells the human body cannot simply regrow
Footage from the Red Sea shows octopuses hunting side by side with fish — and when a fish partner hangs back instead of flushing prey out on cue, the octopus has been filmed punching it with an extended arm, sometimes for no food reward at all
SpaceX publishes Starlink orbit files three times a day so its satellites do not collide with anything else, and one week of them was enough to reconstruct the density of the air 482 kilometres up, longitude by latitude — a map its author believes is the first of its kind built from real data rather than a simulation
Mexico City is slowly sinking into the lake it tried to erase — the ancient bed of Lake Texcoco, where Tenochtitlan once stood and where the modern capital now collapses centimetre by centimetre
Drones over the Azores recorded two sperm whales turning to face each other, converging at speed and striking head-on with the front of the skull — the battering-ram collision the species' anatomy had implied for two centuries, and nobody had ever filmed
Merck and Moderna's individualised mRNA melanoma vaccine just won a Phase 3 trial outright — 1,137 patients, randomised two-to-one, both the primary and key secondary endpoint met — and the companies still won't say by how much until a medical conference decides when
Just 0.55 light-years in projected distance from the Milky Way’s four-million-solar-mass black hole, a dying star is still producing silicate dust while water survives inside its vast envelope—defying expectations that the Galactic centre’s intense radiation would make such chemistry impossible. Webb observations made in 2025 revealed the discovery in August 2026.
