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On 28 May 2025, a mountainside above the Lötschental valley in southern Switzerland gave way. Rock had been loading onto the Birchgletscher for years; when the glacier finally failed, roughly 9.57…
Chemists have a name for the kind of molecule they had never quite caught in space: a true sugar, a carbohydrate with the right skeleton to slot into the chemistry of living things. Simpler…
Spider fangs do not look like they should have a fossil record. They are delicate, hollow and mostly made of the kind of soft tissue that rots long before it can turn to stone. So the question of…
In quantum technology, sometimes the most valuable thing in a material is a flaw. The most famous example lives in diamond, where a missing carbon atom paired with a nitrogen atom creates a defect…
In 2010, a severe drought gripped the Amazon, one of a run of exceptional dry spells this century that have tested the world's largest rainforest. Droughts like that are grim to live through and, for…
In the airless mud of a river near Libreville, in Gabon, a single cell keeps finding its way down. It is a ciliate: a fringe of beating hairs, a nucleus, the sort of organism a high-school microscope…
Most humanoid robots are designed in the order you would expect. First, the engineers settle the body: the length of the limbs, where the motors sit, and how much each joint can push. Only then does…
In the Botanical Garden of the University of Potsdam grows a South African plant called Wachendorfia thyrsiflora, the butterfly lily. Look into one of its yellow flowers and you find a small…
Predicting what a system will do next is one problem. Predicting the moment it stops behaving the way it used to is a much harder one, and for most of the systems scientists care about, the more…
In the year 1181, astronomers in China and Japan noted a new star in the sky, a "guest star" that lingered for months before fading. Eight and a half centuries later, that entry in the historical…
The evidence is a single lower jaw. It is robust, set with unusually large canine and premolar teeth and molars whose chewing surfaces are rounded and heavily textured, the kind of teeth suited to a…
TESS has one job, and for eight years it has done it well: stare at stars and wait for a planet to cross in front of one, dimming its light by a fraction of a percent. That method, the transit, has a…