A ribbon of black slime longer than a blue whale secretes paralyzing neurotoxin
After a North Sea storm, a dark tangle in the wrack line can look like discarded nylon rope.
Sep 8, 2026
Deeper reporting,
thinking made visible.
Longer essays and features from Science Blog. Pieces here go through additional research and review.
Life
Scientists formally name loud Ecuadorian frog after 24 million years of hidden identity
How does a frog that calls loudly from bromeliads at night, across a swathe of western Ecuador, reach 2026 without a scientific name of its own?
Sep 8, 2026
Cicadas stuck to a 1930 forest map, ignoring regrown Iowa woodland today
In one Iowa county, the map that best predicts where 17-year cicadas were singing in 2024 is a map of the county's trees drawn from aerial photographs taken in 1930.
Sep 8, 2026
Sponge larvae shut down most of their genes when sunset is delayed
The preparation happens at sunset while the larva is still swimming, and most of the regions that change at that point are closing rather than opening.
Sep 8, 2026
Young pygmy raccoons invented a never-before-seen game on a Mexican beach
Across 64 hours of watching at a single beach club, the team logged 14 ball-making attempts and eight finished balls, and recorded no ball-making at all at a comparable site roughly 30 kilometres away.
Sep 8, 2026
Synthetic DNA letter reveals the molecular trade-off between accuracy and speed
Dong Wang at the University of California San Diego and Steven Benner at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in…
Sep 7, 2026
Two pages of the York Gospels and a third bound in with it later carry the DNA of the virus that causes sheeppox, and the team that found…
A team led from University College Dublin recovered 21 new genomes of a livestock virus, most of them from sheep teeth and from the pages of medieval books, which are made of animal skin.
Sep 7, 2026
About a thousand people across Switzerland buried cotton underpants at sites of their own choosing for two months, and the pairs pulled out…
Private gardens, arable fields, permanent grassland and lawns each took delivery of the same object in 2021: standardised white…
Sep 7, 2026
Archaeologists have dug at the Assyrian capital of Nimrud since 1845 almost entirely on its palace mound, and a new survey of the whole…
What the world knows about the Assyrian empire, it mostly knows from kings. The palace reliefs and the royal inscriptions that…
Sep 7, 2026