Two cups. That was all Curiosity had. Two sealed metal cups holding a strong alkaline fluid called TMAH, ferried across 225 million kilometres of space…
Apr 21, 2026
Set a crab down on a beach and watch what happens. It doesn't hesitate, doesn't pivot awkwardly like a dog trying to reverse.
Apr 21, 2026
Seven little worms, none more than a few millimeters long, were picked from acid-dissolved rock in southern Shaanxi Province over the course of painstaking residue-hunting.
Apr 20, 2026
Shiyu Sun was looking at a small blob of human stem cells on the eighth day of an experiment.
Apr 20, 2026
Serotonin lifts moods. Sometimes it also makes ears ring harder. In a new paper out in PNAS, researchers at Oregon Health & Science University and Anhui…
Apr 20, 2026
For decades, the problem was the cells themselves. Human CD4+ T cells, the immune sentinels that HIV dismantles so methodically, turned out to be almost impossibly difficult to infect in a laboratory dish.
Apr 20, 2026
The upper beak of a kea parrot is a serious implement. Hooked, sharp, powerful enough to pry apart rocks and strip bark from mountain beech trees, it is the bird's primary instrument for eating, fighting, and social maneuvering.
Apr 20, 2026
At the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado, a single aluminum ion hangs suspended in a trap, cooled to fractions of a degree above absolute zero.
Apr 20, 2026
The tank itself is unremarkable. A metre wide, two metres long, five centimetres deep, filled with ordinary water in a lab in Okinawa.
Apr 20, 2026
He was seated in the corner, at the rear of the tomb. Three blows to the skull, each one from something heavy and bladed, probably an axe.
Apr 20, 2026
Heat the iron core of an electric motor past 60 degrees Celsius and something strange begins to happen at the microscopic scale.
Apr 20, 2026
Around week nineteen of pregnancy, something shifts. The fetal brain, which has until that point been drawing cholesterol from maternal circulation, begins making its own.
Apr 20, 2026
Zoom in far enough on a piece of clear acrylic and something strange appears. The surface isn't smooth at all.
Apr 20, 2026
The rooms where spacecraft are built are among the most sterile environments on Earth.
Apr 20, 2026
