There is something genuinely strange about the upper atmosphere. While Earth's surface bakes, the stratosphere has been getting colder, shedding roughly two degrees Celsius since the mid-1980s.
May 11, 2026
Every year, hundreds of thousands of men with low-grade prostate cancer face a recurring dilemma: submit to another biopsy, with its attendant discomfort and…
May 10, 2026
An elephant's trunk contains roughly 40,000 individual muscle segments, each capable of contracting independently, which is how the animal can crack open a watermelon and then, thirty seconds later, pick up a single peanut from the ground.
May 10, 2026
Fifty-six million years is a long time to be frozen. It is longer than the entire Cenozoic, longer than the reign of the dinosaurs, longer, frankly, than most scientists thought physically possible for a global glaciation.
May 10, 2026
Eight thousand five hundred. Not the round ten thousand that's been drummed into public consciousness for the better part of three decades, not the vague "move…
May 10, 2026
Teeth tell the truth. It's one of the few things paleontologists can more or less rely on: rock-hard, slow-decay, chemically stubborn, teeth preserve the details of a life that softer tissues surrender in the first centuries of burial.
May 9, 2026
A phonon is absurdly small. The quantum of vibrational energy, the irreducible minimum of sound, it carries no mass and lives only briefly before dissolving back into the thermal noise of whatever material surrounds it.
May 9, 2026
The livers were not supposed to be part of the experiment. Joshua Lipschutz and his team at the Medical University of South Carolina were studying something…
May 9, 2026
The relationship runs in both directions. That's the part that keeps catching researchers off guard: not merely that premenstrual disorders and psychiatric…
May 9, 2026
The mouse twitches its whiskers. A fraction of a second later, its pupils begin to swell.
May 9, 2026
Everything oncologists thought they knew about testosterone and cancer pointed one direction.
May 9, 2026
The obvious target, if you want to help someone stop smoking, seems like it would be the craving itself.
May 9, 2026
It sits on a fingertip. Four millimetres by four millimetres, half a millimetre thick, sealed inside a sliver of light-blocking polyethylene because even ordinary room light would throw off the readings.
May 9, 2026
Patchouli has spent decades earning a reputation as the scent of joss sticks and 1970s nostalgia, the kind of smell that clings to vintage clothing shops and makes certain people leave the room.
May 8, 2026
