Teen volunteer firefighter linked to Fontainebleau blaze
Eighteen years old.
That is the age of the volunteer firefighter now under formal investigation.
Suspected of starting a fire in the woods south of Paris.
It...
A sliver returns: The Moon on July 16
It’s coming back. Slowly.
The right side of the disk is lighting up again, if you are looking up from the Northern Hemisphere. Down south,...
Congo’s Orange-Lipped Mystery Monkey
Deep in the Democratic Republic of Congo rainforest a monkey roars. It snorts too. Scientists just found it.
It has orange lips. They are distinct....
Hide-and-seek in the Beta Pictoris system
Third planet found. Or rather, revealed. It was always there, just hiding behind the glare.
The target is Beta Pictoris, a star in Pictor roughly...
The Electron Can’t Hide From Time
You thought Heisenberg had it covered. You didn’t.
For a century, physicists have bowed to the Uncertainty Principle. It says you can know where a...
Sugar in the Void
Raspberries.
Sunless tanning lotion.
And now, the dark cloud near our galaxy's core.
Astronomers finally spotted a sugar molecule in interstellar space, using the Yebes 40m and...
NASA Stacks Artemis III Rocket: 2027 Lunar Mission Prep Begins
The first heavy piece just rolled into place. 🚀
The bottom section of the left solid rocket booster (SRB)—the muscle behind the Artemis III mission—is...
Heat lingers in the UK as bans kick in and temperatures...
Temperatures drop this weekend.
Just slightly. The heatwave isn’t leaving. In fact, heat health alerts are still active for almost all of England. You won’t...
AI Spotted the Secret Shape of Supercooled Water
Water is weird.
It covers the planet, gets under your skin, yet refuses to act like a normal liquid. Freeze it? It expands. Weird.
For years,...
A Tiny Jaw, A Huge Question Mark
Lepidosauromorphs are weird. We know what they look like now. Lizards, snakes, the tuatara in New Zealand. They are everywhere. Diverse. Successful. But their...
Chemistry Textbooks Just Lost Their Shirt
For nearly one hundred years. Kids have memorized the inductive effect. It was the way electrons were thought to move. Simple. Clear. Until it...
Vantor Shows Off The World in 3D
This looks good. Maybe even stunning. Vantor has a new way of seeing the planet, and they want you to look at it. They...
Satellite Dog Collars Just Solved The Worst Nightmar
You’re hiking.
Deep woods.
Your dog catches a scent—deer, rabbit, doesn't matter—and vanishes into the ferns. He’s got a GPS collar, sure, but your phone has...
Relativity messes up chemistry
We usually think of relativity as something that happens near black holes. Or in particle accelerators. Far away. Not in the bottle of acetone...
Earth’s Complex Life Has a Long Way to Go
The sun is aging. It is getting hotter, bigger, more aggressive. Eventually it will boil our oceans and swallow the planet whole. Standard estimates...
Red, White, Blue Sky: Chandra’s July 4 Gift
NASA didn’t just give us fireworks this time.
Chandra, their X-ray observatory, dropped four new images. They look like flags. Not because space has patriotism....
Can genes make us bad?
Ian Sample talks to Kathryn Paige Harden. A behavioural geneticist. Professor of psychology at UT Austin.
She asks a question everyone pretends to understand. How...
The First Patient
Not This Time
I turned 13. And died. Or so the doctors said. It was Easter 2021 just ending, the lockdowns lifting, but my body...
Orangutans Are Basically Planning Playdates
Solitary animals? Not entirely.
Orangutan moms are doing something we didn't think possible. They are adjusting their movements, crossing into neighboring territories, specifically to set...
The shells they both liked
It wasn’t a handover ceremony. No grand交接 of power in 59,000 BCE Turkey.
Just Homo sapiens walking into a cave. Üçağızlı II, specifically. A cramped...
The Galaxy’s Ghost Glow Still Screams Dark Matter
Dark matter is back on the menu.
Or at least it didn't get kicked off. For years, astronomers have squinted at a strange gamma-ray haze...
Saturday Morning Time Travel
Kids born in the '80s didn't have streaming libraries. They had Saturday mornings. And static. And ads that lasted longer than the cartoons.
Live-action sci-fi?...
China’s Tianwen-2 Catches Up to Earth’s Cosmic Tag-Along
One billion kilometers. That is how far it took.
On July 2 2026 the Tianwen-2 probe finally arrived. It didn't stop running though it slowed...
Bottling lightning, robot butlers, and 29-day immortality
Tom Whipple is wandering through the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition.
He’s looking for ways to pin down nature itself. How do you keep natural...
Painting the Bottom: The Great Bahama Bank
It looks like wet ink. Swirls of blue. Streaks of green.
From orbit, it’s abstract art.
Below is an ancient underwater platform in the Bahamas....
