Brain & Behavior
Post-retirement paycheck has a hidden Social Security loophole
The government has a loophole for retirement windfalls—but only if you know to look for it.
Sep 8, 2026
Editorial Team
Science Blog Editorial Team
Editorial Team
Earth & Environment
Danish data center turns waste heat into warmth for 11,000 homes
As data centers consume ever more power, one facility in Denmark shows how to turn a costly cooling problem into a heating solution for thousands of households.
Sep 8, 2026
Technology
Synthetic DNA letter reveals the molecular trade-off between accuracy and speed
Four cryo-electron microscopy structures at 2.42 to 2.75 angstroms show the P-with-Z pair, in both its original and its redesigned form, sitting in the polymerase's active site in ordinary Watson-Crick geometry, and the gel kinetics supply an awkward corollary.
Sep 7, 2026
Earth & Environment
About a thousand people across Switzerland buried cotton underpants at sites of their own choosing for two months, and the pairs pulled out…
The Swiss project called Proof by Underpants went into the ground in 2021, and its authors say their results suggest the test reflects soil fertility more strongly than soil health in the broader ecological sense, with the gardens that rotted the most cloth also carrying phosphorus far above the level Swiss guidelines call optimal.
Sep 7, 2026
Life
Researchers put bright patterned sleeves on 94 hunting cats, and the birds they brought home fell by nearly two-thirds
A simple wardrobe change revealed a blind spot in predators: birds evolved to spot danger, but mammals didn't.
Sep 7, 2026
Life
Black vultures nested a metre or two from an incubating Chaco eagle on an abandoned Argentine hunting tower, and the eagle's egg was gone…
Two cases, one from 2019 and one from the 2024 to 2025 austral summer, are what the authors call the first documentation of black vultures breeding within a metre or two of predatory raptors, and they say they cannot rule out that the vulture pair took the eagle's egg.
Sep 6, 2026
Life
Thirty-five dogs watched forty second videos of three human faces, one of them their own owner's, and blinked at a higher rate when the…
Two different comparisons sit inside the result, and a third prediction failed. The blink-video effect appeared only when the face on screen was the dog's owner; the direct owner-versus-stranger comparison separated only for female owners; and the prediction that dogs would time their blinks to a human's was not confirmed.
Sep 6, 2026
Technology
A five-story school built in Shanghai in 1935 stood in the way of a new office complex, so engineers dug underneath it and fitted 198…
Instead of demolishing Shanghai's 85-year-old school, engineers gave it mechanical legs and walked it 62 meters across town, rotating the 7,600-ton structure like a chess piece into its new position.
Sep 5, 2026
Space
The left lobe of Pluto's heart is a nitrogen ice sheet with no impact crater of any size in images down to about eighty metres per pixel…
The dark features were photographed in 2015; this is the first published attempt the authors know of to read them as liquid flowing in the modern epoch.
Sep 5, 2026
Space
Scientists who read 16 years of radio tracking from three Mars orbiters say the mantle beneath the planet's southern highlands runs 200 to…
The tracking shows Mars deforming in a way a uniform planet should not, and the least strained explanation is a hemisphere of mantle that something is still keeping warm.
Sep 5, 2026
Physics
Freezing the carbon disulfide inside the nominally 1.37 micrometre core of an optical fibre, by dipping 27.5 centimetres of it in liquid…
The frozen stretch then held a light pulse as a sound wave for three nanoseconds, with a control pulse of 0.205 nanojoules enough to lift the readout three standard deviations clear of the noise, and separately the authors calculate that a cryogenically cooled highly nonlinear fibre would need 150 times more pump power to reach the same storage figure of merit.
Sep 5, 2026
Life
Nine museum specimens catalogued as ambergris had all passed the traditional hot needle test, and chemical profiling then found no ambrein…
Chemistry found the marker compound treated as diagnostic of ambergris in nine of the eleven samples, a different nine from the nine museum specimens, while sperm whale DNA turned up in seven, and the authors recommend both methods while ranking the chemistry first.
Sep 4, 2026
Popular
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Seneca: "It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness."
The Stoic's promise isn't what Instagram thinks it is: the hardest path to greatness also offers an escape from the metrics that define ordinary ambition.
Sep 4, 2026
Life
Eight of ten blue-throated macaws slid a feeder door upward after watching another macaw do it, and not one of the five tested without a…
The result held on one device and did not reach significance on the other, and the paper's own summaries carry that result further than its statistics do.
Sep 4, 2026