Articles

Ryleigh Davis was not looking for clay. She and her colleagues at Caltech had aimed the James Webb Space Telescope at Neptune's rings and three of its small inner moons to answer a plainer question:…

In 1991 the Medical Research Council stopped a trial early. Women who had already carried one pregnancy affected by a neural tube defect were given either folic acid or a placebo before trying to…

Haiyan is over. It came ashore in the Philippines in November 2013, and what it did there is a matter of record. But a storm that has finished happening can be made to happen again, which is the…

Pull a litre of seawater from beneath the ice north of Svalbard and hold it up to the light. It looks like the cleanest water anywhere on the planet, and by most measures it is. What it also carries,…

There is a corner of Antarctica where it does not snow enough to bury anything. The McMurdo Dry Valleys are a polar desert of bare gravel and frozen ground, kept ice-free by winds that strip away…

Japan's mapping agency published its first radar picture of the Kumamoto rupture on 29 July, about a day after the ground stopped moving. It is not a photograph. It is the difference between two…

A black hole with nothing to eat is, for observational purposes, absent. No disk of hot gas, no X-rays, no jet. Theory says big galaxies should be littered with them: black holes knocked loose from a…

In the summers of 1936 and 1938, two Norwegian expeditions led by the geologist Adolf Hoel flew cameras over Svalbard and came home with 5,507 photographs. They were taken to make maps. Twenty-six…

Pull on a rubber band and nothing interesting happens at the molecular level; the chains just uncoil. The materials described in a new paper answer force with a decision. The building blocks are…

At 4:51 a.m. on Saturday, some North Islanders got a few seconds of notice that most earthquakes never give. Their phones buzzed loudly, overriding silent mode, a heartbeat before the ground began to…

Few stars have carried as much baggage as KIC 8462852. Better known as Tabby's star, after astronomer Tabetha Boyajian, it made headlines in 2015 for dimming in ways no ordinary planet could produce:…

Kallichore is not the kind of moon that makes it onto posters. Less than four kilometers across, it circles Jupiter at hundreds of millions of kilometers from Earth, one of dozens of small, dark…