Longer essays and features from Science Blog. Pieces here go through additional research and review.
Finland’s ninth consecutive first place comes from residents’ life evaluations, while trust, support, freedom and low perceived corruption help explain why those evaluations remain unusually high.
Aug 26, 2026
The upper 2,000 meters of the ocean gained an estimated 23 plus or minus 8 zettajoules in 2025, even as the average sea surface cooled slightly from 2024.
Aug 25, 2026
The proposal comes from a single-author synthesis with no new fossil in it, and its author writes that it will likely not prove widely acceptable.
Aug 25, 2026
A 998-language analysis linked denser word-level encoding with faster matched speech and narrower semantic paths in a 14-language conversation subset, without establishing causation.
Aug 25, 2026
A longitudinal fMRI study found that pre-existing similarities in responses to movie clips anticipated later friendship-network proximity, although the strongest results were narrower than a universal friend detector.
Aug 25, 2026
A 20-year archive revealed non-random plant associations in wild Bornean orangutan diets, identifying candidates for medicinal research without establishing intent or benefit.
Aug 25, 2026
A soft actuator moved and stiffened a natural harbour-seal whisker, revealing how undulated geometry suppresses self-noise while protraction strengthens a wake signal.
Aug 25, 2026
Every so often, the planet does something that atmospheric scientists have been theorising about for decades but have never quite seen happen.
By Kiran Journals · Aug 25, 2026
For almost four hours, a camera watched a dense wall of juvenile arapaima moving through an indoor tank.
Aug 25, 2026
