Science Blog Editorial Team

Technology

The Roman Pantheon's unreinforced concrete dome has stood for nearly 1,900 years and remains the largest of its kind on Earth, partly…

Hadrian's builders finished the Pantheon's 142-foot concrete dome around 128 CE, using progressively lighter volcanic aggregate and a 27-foot hole at its crown. Nearly 1,900 years later, it remains the largest unreinforced concrete dome on Earth — and researchers are still decoding why the concrete keeps healing itself.

Jul 11, 2026

Life

Wombats produce cube-shaped droppings, the only animal known to do so, forming the flat-sided pellets inside the last stretch of their…

Wombats are the only animal on Earth known to produce cube-shaped droppings, formed by uneven stiffness in the last stretch of their intestines and stacked on rocks and logs where round pellets would simply roll away.

Jul 11, 2026

Earth & Environment

Iceland's Hallgrímskirkja church took 41 years to build and was designed to echo the basalt lava columns that cool into hexagonal pillars…

Reykjavík's Hallgrímskirkja church took 41 years to build and was designed by architect Guðjón Samúelsson to echo Iceland's hexagonal basalt lava columns — a 74.5-metre concrete facade shaped like the very rock the island is made of.

Jul 11, 2026

Science

A tiny crustacean called Cymothoa exigua enters a fish through its gills, severs the blood vessels of its tongue until the organ withers…

Cymothoa exigua is the only known parasite that anatomically replaces one of its host's organs. It enters a fish through the gills, severs the blood supply to the tongue until it withers, then anchors onto the stub to serve as a living, functional replacement.

Jul 11, 2026

Science

In 1856, an 18-year-old chemistry student named William Perkin was trying to synthesize quinine at home over Easter when a black residue in…

In 1856, a teenage chemistry student named William Perkin tried to synthesize the antimalarial drug quinine in a home lab over Easter break. He produced a black sludge that turned out to dye silk a brilliant, colorfast purple — and accidentally launched the synthetic dye industry, modern organic chemistry, and the pharmaceutical trade that grew out of coal-tar research.

Jul 11, 2026

Science

In 1847, Hungarian obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis watched maternal deaths fall from 18% to about 2% after ordering doctors to wash their…

In 1847, Ignaz Semmelweis proved that doctors coming from autopsies were killing new mothers, and that a basin of chlorinated lime could stop it. His colleagues drove him into an asylum, where he died of the same infection he had spent his life fighting.

Jul 11, 2026

Science

The Sun launches roughly a trillion kilograms of charged plasma toward Earth in a coronal mass ejection, and the fastest clouds can cross…

A coronal mass ejection carries roughly a billion tonnes of solar plasma across 150 million kilometres of space — and the fastest ones cover that distance in under 18 hours.

Jul 11, 2026

Space

The single loudest sound ever recorded was the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in 1883

Krakatoa is often described as the loudest sound ever recorded, but that sentence needs a small historical correction before it becomes useful.

Jul 11, 2026

Life

Killer whales off the Pacific Northwest speak in distinct dialects passed down through generations, and pods that never interbreed can…

Off the coast of Washington and British Columbia, resident and transient killer whales share the same waters but speak unrelated acoustic languages, with each pod carrying a dialect passed matrilineally across generations that biologists have been able to trace since the 1970s.

Jul 11, 2026

Life

Octopuses in a Dartmouth lab learned to use mirrors to locate food hidden behind them

The mirror part is what makes the story memorable. An octopus sees food in a reflection, does not simply attack the glass, and learns to move through the tank toward the real location of the food it cannot directly see.

Jul 11, 2026

Science

In 1991, eight people sealed themselves inside a glass world in the Arizona desert for two years, and the experiment nearly unravelled when…

The Biosphere 2 oxygen problem is easy to remember as a failure: eight people sealed under glass, the air thinning around them, and a dream of self-contained living suddenly meeting chemistry it had not fully accounted for.

Jul 11, 2026

Health

Dick Van Dyke turned 100 on 13 December 2025 after telling an interviewer, “I never wake up in a bad mood”—and a major 2019 US study found…

Dick Van Dyke turning 100 is an irresistible opening for a story about optimism, because he has made cheerfulness look almost physical for most of a century.

Jul 11, 2026

Technology

A randomized trial by METR found that experienced developers completed real coding tasks 19% slower when allowed to use AI tools

The cleanest result in the METR trial is also the one most likely to be misread.

Jul 11, 2026

Technology

The Dalles spent 13 months fighting to keep Google’s water use secret

In 2022, Google sued to keep its water use in The Dalles, Oregon secret. When the numbers finally came out, the company's data centers were drinking 29 percent of the town's water.

Jul 11, 2026