A Science Blog column

The Long View

Explainers

The Long View steps back. A single finding rarely means much on its own, so this desk connects new research to what came before it, across physics, biology, medicine, and everything in between.

Physics

Start with one cent on day one and double it every day, and by day 30 you would have $5,368,709.12

Our intuitions about exponential growth are catastrophically wrong—and that blindness shapes how we plan, invest, and prepare for the future.

Aug 22, 2026

Space

A laser array on Earth could one day push a gram-scale spacecraft to roughly 20% of the speed of light

A ground laser could push an ultralight sail to nearly 60,000 kilometers per second, but today’s experiments are still testing materials and femtonewton forces.

Aug 21, 2026

Earth & Environment

The mantis shrimp punches with the acceleration of a .22 calibre bullet, creating a cavitation bubble that collapses at nearly the…

The peacock mantis shrimp's strike is fast enough to boil the water behind it. A February 2025 Science paper explains how the animal survives its own punch.

Aug 21, 2026

Health

The Mediterranean diet we know was effectively invented in 1958 by an American physiologist studying the island of Crete

A bestselling diet marketed as ancient wisdom was largely invented in 1958 by a Minnesota physiologist who cherry-picked data from one Greek island.

Aug 21, 2026

Health

People who drink their coffee in the morning and then stop may be onto something

A 40,725-person cohort linked morning-concentrated coffee with lower adjusted cardiovascular mortality, but the raw numbers and study design demand a careful reading.

Aug 20, 2026

Life

For decades, the standard claim was that bacteria in your body outnumbered your own cells ten to one

A 2016 Weizmann Institute recount replaced the famous ten-to-one claim with an estimate of about 38 trillion bacterial cells and 30 trillion human cells in a reference adult man.

Aug 20, 2026

Space

The fastest spacecraft ever built didn't set its record by firing a rocket engine

Parker's speed record began with slowing down. Seven Venus encounters tightened its orbit until solar gravity accelerated it to 692,000 kilometers per hour.

Aug 20, 2026

Health

Aerobic capacity typically falls about 5–10% per decade after early adulthood, but that decline is far from fixed

VO2max declines with age, but small longitudinal studies and broader athlete research show that maintaining endurance training can substantially slow the loss.

Aug 20, 2026

Health

A 30-year study tracking 147,374 people found a striking longevity sweet spot for strength training

A large prospective cohort analysis found its lowest mortality estimate around 90 to 119 minutes of weekly resistance training, with no additional reduction beyond two hours.

Aug 20, 2026

Life

For decades, paleontologists argued that a small tyrannosaur found in Montana’s Hell Creek Formation was merely a young T. rex

Independent Nature and Science studies used a nearly complete skeleton and the original skull’s hyoid bone to show that Nanotyrannus specimens were mature rather than juvenile T. rex individuals.

Aug 20, 2026

Earth & Environment

For roughly 60 million years, rising and falling seas appear to have helped regulate Earth’s climate through an overlooked feedback

A 60-million-year reconstruction links changing shelf area to phosphate availability, ocean oxygen and organic carbon burial, with the strongest feedback appearing at an intermediate sea level.

Aug 20, 2026

Earth & Environment

In Venezuela, a lake roughly the size of Connecticut experiences thunderstorms on nearly 300 nights a year, with lightning sometimes…

A 16-year NASA satellite record ranked Lake Maracaibo first for lightning flash density. Its nightly storm engine is broadly understood, but its extraordinary persistence remains an active research problem.

Aug 19, 2026

Brain & Behavior

Finnish children usually do not begin formal school until the year they turn seven, yet Finland became an education model by producing…

A generation of education reformers drew the wrong conclusion from Finland's success, missing what actually matters in those crucial years before formal schooling begins.

Aug 19, 2026

Earth & Environment

In 2025, scientists drilling beneath the Atlantic off New England pumped up about 50,000 litres of remarkably fresh groundwater

Expedition 501 directly sampled freshened groundwater beneath the New England shelf, but its age, regional continuity and sustainable recoverability remain open questions.

Aug 19, 2026