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For two years, a sealed culture of marine microbes fed itself in a Chinese laboratory: a cyanobacterium and the bacteria that live alongside it, recycling their own nutrients, with nothing added and…
In late July 2022, a fire set deliberately in the sandstone gorges of the Czech Elbe country began to move north. It burned into August, crossed an international border, and left two national park…
Most record-setting spin qubits start with silicon that has had one of its own isotopes taken out. About one silicon atom in 20 is silicon-29, the element's only stable isotope with a magnetic…
The case for DNA as an archive has been the same for a decade. It is denser than anything engineered, it keeps for centuries in the cold and the dark, and it draws no power while it sits there. The…
A heatwave arrives faster than it leaves. Anyone who has sat through one knows the shape of it: the air thickens over a day or two, then sits there for a week before grudgingly letting go. Climate…
In June a camera on the Gran Telescopio Canarias stared for two nights at a patch of sky beside the spiral galaxy M94. Ignacio Trujillo, who led the observation from the Instituto de Astrofísica de…
Follow the Moon through a month and its brightness does something that simple arithmetic cannot account for. It climbs as the lit crescent fattens, roughly in step with the growing area of sunlit…
A seismometer reports one number for one patch of ground. The house a kilometer down the road has no seismometer of its own, so whatever shook it has to be inferred from the instrument that does…
Sequence a bacterium and you get a parts list with most of the labels missing. Streptococcus pneumoniae, the organism responsible for a great deal of pneumonia and meningitis, encodes a broad array…
Erik Tihelka was leafing through a secondhand Russian paleontology textbook when a line drawing stopped him: a small, many-legged animal from a shale bed in West Texas, labeled a crustacean. He…
One program in this benchmark never looks at the data. It ignores the step counts, the sleep hours and the resting heart rates, and returns the same number every time: the average score in the data…
The chimneys at Lost City are the wrong color. Where the black smokers strung along the mid-ocean ridges build dark spires out of metal sulfide, this field on a bald dome of mantle rock in the…