The chip is about the size of a thumbnail. Under a dark-field microscope it glows faintly, a grid of tiny crystalline specks arranged with the regularity of pixels on a screen.
May 25, 2026
Remove a queen from a tropical paper wasp colony and the nest goes to pieces, more or less immediately.
May 25, 2026
Every year, roughly 90 tropical cyclones spin up across the world's oceans, each one dragging carbon dioxide out of the sea and flinging it into the air.
May 25, 2026
On a world some 700 light years away, the wind never stops. WASP-94A b spins one face toward its star forever, so a single hemisphere bakes at well over 1,000 degrees while the other freezes in permanent night.
May 25, 2026
The ear appears all at once. A glass vial of clear gel, a stage rotating beneath a 150-milliwatt blue laser diode, a hologram flickering through 1,440 frames…
May 22, 2026
Pull every American float, every American mooring, every American research cruise out of the world's ocean monitoring network and what you have left is worse than if you took a coin and flipped away four-fifths of all the data ever gathered.
May 22, 2026
They have names that sound borrowed from a fantasy novel: melilitite, nephelinite, ultramafic lamprophyre, kimberlite.
May 22, 2026
The fossil had been catalogued, labelled and largely ignored for years. It sat in the research collection of the American Museum of Natural History under the…
May 22, 2026
Stuff sponges into the walls of a plastic lattice, pump sound through it, and something deeply strange happens.
May 21, 2026
The number is small, almost unremarkable at first glance: 0.014. That is the difference, on a scale from zero to one, between how fast two groups of older Americans aged over two years.
May 21, 2026
Somewhere above 4,000 metres on the Tibetan Plateau, a river bend that held its position for decades has begun to slip sideways.
May 21, 2026
Water, at exactly zero degrees, doesn't know what it wants to be. Add the tiniest nudge of energy and it stays liquid; subtract the same and it snaps into ice, molecules locking into a perfect repeating lattice.
May 21, 2026
The storming of the US Capitol in January 2021. The ransacking of Brazil's Congress two years later.
May 21, 2026
Fifty adults, mild-to-moderate depression, a Samsung smartwatch, and a smartphone app that pinged them four times a day.
May 21, 2026
