Slice away a small cap of cells from a frog embryo, drop them in a dish, and within hours something happens that still catches biologists off guard.
Mar 16, 2026
Something fires in the motor cortex. Not a hand movement, exactly. More like the ghost of one: a neural pattern that, in another life, would have extended a finger toward the letter Q.
Mar 16, 2026
Swallowing becomes a problem long before most people notice it. A slight hesitation between bite and gulp, a sentence abandoned halfway through because the muscles involved in forming it are no longer quite keeping up.
Mar 16, 2026
Body mass index is, when you strip it back, a Victorian arithmetic formula. Weight divided by height squared.
Mar 16, 2026
The numbers didn't add up. When astronomers trained the James Webb Space Telescope on a small world called L 98-59 d, roughly 35 light-years away, they got back something that made them reach for the textbooks, and then set those textbooks aside.
Mar 16, 2026
In a lab at the University of Edinburgh, a discarded plastic bottle sits in a flask of alkaline solution, slowly coming apart.
Mar 16, 2026
The scan takes about half an hour. You lie still while a radioactive tracer courses through your blood and binds to abnormal proteins in your brain, and the machine maps where those proteins have accumulated.
Mar 13, 2026
Submerged to the nostrils in warm, slow water, the animal waited. It had been waiting a long time, probably; crocodiles are good at that.
Mar 13, 2026
Three sulfur atoms in a row. That is, more or less, the entire secret. The trisulfide bond, a structural feature found in everything from garlic to anti-cancer…
Mar 13, 2026
Every nerve fibre in your brain and spinal cord is wrapped in something a bit like electrical tape.
Mar 13, 2026
Andy Tzanidakis wasn't looking for a catastrophe. He was working through a stack of archival telescope data (the unglamorous, necessary kind of astronomy that…
Mar 13, 2026
You say two words into a microphone: "autumn forest." A few seconds later, the colors appear, on your actual face, projected there in real time, shifting across your cheeks and eyelids and lips while you check yourself in the mirror.
Mar 13, 2026
The vagus nerve runs from brainstem to belly like an old telephone cable, thick and purposeful, carrying signals about heart rate and breathing and the slow contractile business of digestion.
Mar 12, 2026
The Amazon gets all the credit. It always has. When scientists talk about South America as a carbon sink, when policymakers argue about protecting tropical…
Mar 12, 2026
