Life
Earth Fungus Might Survive a Trip to Mars
The rooms where spacecraft are built are among the most sterile environments on Earth.
Apr 20, 2026
Earth & Environment
Ocean Circulation That Heats Europe Is on Track to Lose Half Its Strength by 2100
The number that's been in the reports, the assessments, the headlines for years now is 32. A 32 percent weakening of the Atlantic's great overturning current by the end of this century, give or take.
Apr 18, 2026
Health
Malaria’s Hidden Toll: The Disease That Keeps Damaging Children’s Brains for a Decade
By the time a child recovers from cerebral malaria, the worst seems to be over. The seizures have stopped.
Apr 18, 2026
Health
Why Fructose Behaves Less Like a Calorie and More Like a Hormone
Drop a gram of fructose into a human liver cell and something strange happens in the first few seconds.
Apr 17, 2026
Technology
Scientists Program Flat Sheets of Cells to Fold Themselves Into Bowls and Roses
Fibroblasts do not normally care what shape they make. Put a few million of them on a soft gel in a Barcelona lab, wait three days, and they will crawl into…
Apr 16, 2026
Brain & Behavior
Alzheimer’s Drugs Clear the Plaques but Leave Patients No Better Off
The brain scans look unambiguous. After 18 months of treatment, the amyloid plaques that riddle the brains of early Alzheimer's patients are visibly reduced, sometimes dramatically so.
Apr 16, 2026
Life
Sperm Whales Have Vowels and the Grammar to Go With Them
Off the coast of Dominica, in water deep enough to swallow a skyscraper, a female sperm whale draws breath and dives.
Apr 16, 2026
Health
Black Licorice Compound Glycyrrhizin Could Help Millions with Crohn’s Disease
Inside a laboratory at the University of Tokyo, miniature intestines are dying. Not real intestines, exactly, but something close enough to matter: tiny…
Apr 16, 2026
Bloggers
How Scientists Learned to Read Information Encoded in Darkness Inside Light
Inside a beam of light, there are places where the light simply isn't. Not dim, not scattered, not absorbed.
Apr 16, 2026
Life
Africa’s Elephants Are Written in Their Genes, and the Story Is One of Vanishing Connection
In tissue samples drawn from elephant skin biopsies across 17 African countries, in collections that have sat in biobanks for more than thirty years, something like a historical record was waiting to be read.
Apr 16, 2026
Physics
Black Hole That Dances in the Wind Finally Tells Us How Powerful Its Jets Really Are
For eighteen years, the radio telescopes kept watching. Observation after observation, the hard-state jets of Cygnus X-1 appeared in the data as twin lines extending from the compact core of one of astronomy's most famous objects.
Apr 16, 2026
Brain & Behavior
Walking Alone in Nature Could Be the Best Cure for Loneliness
The walk takes maybe twenty minutes, down a slope of birch and pine to where Lake Mjøsa opens out before you.
Apr 16, 2026
Earth & Environment
America Is Getting Hotter. People Aren’t Leaving Because of It
The assumption has a certain intuitive force to it: temperatures rise, places become unbearable, people pack up and leave.
Apr 16, 2026
Life
Why Your Bee Sting and a Pencil Share the Same Shape
Take a sharpened pencil and look at the tip. Not a vague glance. Really look, under a magnifying glass if you have one.
Apr 16, 2026