Articles

When a kilometer-thick ice sheet retreated from Vancouver Island at the end of the last glaciation, it left behind a scoured, sculpted landscape. That is exactly what makes the island a hard place to…

For years, the shorthand explanation for the earthquakes shaking north-central Texas was simple. Drillers inject enormous volumes of salty wastewater deep underground; the water raises pressure on…

The brain runs on roughly the wattage of a dim light bulb. A large AI model can draw the output of a small power plant. That gap is the quiet motivation behind a whole field of research, and behind a…

The hardest part was never the motor. It was the listening. When a person's hand still works, the brain sends a clean order down the nerves and the muscles snap to it. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis…

Time on a synchrotron beamline is one of the scarcer resources in experimental science. These facilities (building-sized machines that whip electrons around a ring to produce intense X-rays) are…

Ask a large language model why it answered the way it did and it will happily tell you. The problem is that the answer it gives and the computation it ran are not the same thing. Somewhere inside, a…

A launch chart and an independent audit looked at the same model this week and came away telling almost opposite stories. On 26 June, OpenAI previewed GPT-5.6 "Sol," presenting its own benchmark…

A brown dwarf never quite made it as a star. Too heavy to be a planet, too light to sustain the hydrogen fusion that powers the Sun, it spends its life slowly cooling. The coldest of them, the…

Snakes are a paradox of the fossil record. There are more than 4,000 species alive today, slithering through deserts, rivers, treetops and soil on every continent but Antarctica, one of evolution's…

The lesions were the easy part. For more than a decade, biologists had watched brown bullhead catfish in Lake Memphremagog turn up with patches of blackened, malignant skin; by 2014, nearly one in…

In a volcanic corner of northeastern Catalonia, a good deal of the local disaster history had never lived in any single place. Some of it sat in government seismic catalogues. Some was buried in a…

For most of the late summer of 2023, the North Sea sat under stubborn high pressure. Clear skies, weak winds, and a shallow mixed layer let heat pile up in the top few tens of meters of water and…