Long Reads

Deeper reporting,
thinking made visible.

Longer essays and features from Science Blog. Pieces here go through additional research and review.

Something strange happened to American children after 1990

A 2011 analysis found several creativity-test scores falling after 1990, especially among young children. A later meta-analytic reappraisal found no evidence of a generational creativity crisis.

Aug 17, 2026

Space

For decades, scientists believed Titan hid a vast global ocean beneath its frozen crust

A newly measured tidal delay in Cassini's radio data favors warm, dissipative high-pressure ice and scattered melt pockets over Titan's long-assumed global ocean.

Aug 17, 2026

Earth & Environment

Earth's inner core has begun drifting backward relative to the surface after decades of moving slightly faster

Repeating earthquakes show Earth's solid inner core retracing its position relative to the mantle, while newer work reveals deformation in the same deep boundary region.

Aug 17, 2026

Space

In December 2025, startup Starcloud trained the first large language model ever trained in orbit, using an NVIDIA H100

Starcloud-1 used a data-centre-class NVIDIA H100 to train NanoGPT on Shakespeare in orbit, a small but genuine demonstration distinct from its preloaded Gemma inference run.

Aug 17, 2026

Brain & Behavior

People form judgments about a stranger’s trustworthiness and competence after seeing their face for just one-tenth of a second

Princeton participants formed stable face-based impressions within 100 milliseconds. The study measured agreement between observers, not the accuracy of their character judgments.

Aug 16, 2026

Technology

We tend to picture the Sahara as an eternal desert, but sediment cores and cave paintings show that as recently as 6,000 years ago it was a…

Sediment cores, ancient DNA, and 15,000 rock paintings at Tassili n'Ajjer confirm the Sahara was a green savannah 6,000 years ago. Its collapse into desert took a century or two.

Aug 16, 2026

Brain & Behavior

Quote by Viktor Frankl: Between stimulus and response there is a space, in that space is our power to choose our response, and in our…

What neuroscience reveals about our most beloved quote on human agency—and whether the freedom it promises is real.

Aug 16, 2026

Earth & Environment

We assume the deepest parts of the ocean are dark and empty, but the walls of the Mariana Trench hold snailfish drifting five miles down…

Five miles below the surface of the western Pacific, in a crescent-shaped gash in the seafloor 1,580 miles long, small pink fish are drifting through water that would crush a steel submarine.

Aug 16, 2026

Science

A coastal redwood named Hyperion stands 115.9 metres tall in a hidden fold of Redwood National Park, taller than the Statue of Liberty, and…

In a fold of Redwood National Park in northern California, a coast redwood called Hyperion rises 115.92 metres from the forest floor.

Aug 16, 2026