Health
Nearly a Third of Rodents in the Pacific Northwest Carry Hantavirus Antibodies
Deer mice look, for the most part, like deer mice. Small, large-eyed, improbably soft.
May 21, 2026
Health
Hidden Firewall Keeps Pancreatic Precancers in Check
Most of us are probably walking around with them right now. Tiny clusters of abnormal cells, nestled inside an otherwise healthy pancreas, carrying the very genetic mutations that mark the early stages of one of the most lethal cancers known.
May 21, 2026
Life
T. Rex Had Tiny Arms Because Its Head Got Too Good at Killing
Measure the arm of a Carnotaurus, and you get a number that feels wrong. The Carnotaurus was a bull-horned predator from Patagonia, roughly the length of a bus, built for violence.
May 20, 2026
Health
How the Age You First Had Sex Could Shape How You Age Decades Later
Somewhere in the genome are signatures of a teenager's choices. Not their choices exactly, perhaps, but the biological tendencies that nudge those choices in one direction rather than another.
May 20, 2026
Health
Sewage Is Spotting a Deadly Fungus Before Patients Fall Ill
Every hospital has drains. Sinks, toilets, floor gullies in procedure rooms, the slow trickle from IV lines flushed between patients.
May 20, 2026
Health
Timing Your Vitamin C Could Blunt a Cancer Risk Hidden in Your Dinner
Run the numbers long enough and something strange emerges. A computer model of the human stomach, tracking nitrate and nitrite through saliva and acid and a…
May 20, 2026
Brain & Behavior
Free School Lunches Cut Student Suspensions, and the Effect Is Biggest Where You'd Least Expect It
The cafeteria line, it turns out, is doing more than feeding children. A new study tracking suspension rates across American schools has found that providing…
May 20, 2026
Technology
How Turning a Room Into a Giant Screen Gives Machines the 3D Vision They've Always Lacked
Point a conventional 3D sensor at a chrome-plated ball bearing and watch it fail.
May 20, 2026
Earth & Environment
Ancient Rainforest Foragers Were Eating More Plants Than Anyone Realised
Inside the limestone caves of Sri Lanka's wet lowlands, tens of thousands of years of human history are compressed into stratified rock and buried bone.
May 20, 2026
Brain & Behavior
Why Mums Are Such Effective Friendship Killers
There's a particular kind of social calculus that children perform, usually around age ten or eleven, when they start to feel the competing gravitational pulls of their parents and their peers.
May 20, 2026
Life
Tiny Ocean Drifter May Spend Half a Decade at Sea
Slice through a blue button and what you find looks, improbably, like a tree. Concentric rings of chitin, the same material that makes up crab shells, packed into a disc no wider than your thumbnail.
May 20, 2026
Earth & Environment
How Asteroid Strikes May Have Sparked Earth's First Breath of Oxygen
Somewhere in the foothills of South Korea's Hapcheon province, in a narrow valley where a stream runs intermittently, there are small rounded stones buried twenty centimetres beneath the gravel.
May 20, 2026
Life
Gray Mold Has Been Reading Your Strawberries for Years. We Just Figured Out How
Pick up a punnet of blueberries from any supermarket shelf and there's a reasonable chance, depending on how long they've been sitting there, that you'll spot it: a faint grey fuzz creeping across the skin.
May 20, 2026
Earth & Environment
Ancient Canadian Shield Rocks Are Leaking Hydrogen. Enough to Power Hundreds of Homes.
Go far enough underground in northern Ontario and the rock around you is older than almost anything on the surface of this planet.
May 20, 2026