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Somewhere in a chemical catalog sits a compound that nobody has ever dropped onto living cells while reading what happens to their genes. That is the ordinary case rather than the exception.…
Ask a language model to grade a piece of writing twice, and the second grade is supposed to be a fresh one. Five researchers at Infobip, a messaging company with offices across Croatia and Bosnia,…
A heatwave rarely leaves an obvious body count. There is no single moment, no wreckage to photograph. Most of the people it kills die at home or in hospital wards over a stretch of days, their deaths…
A mouse dies in the leaf litter of a northern European wood, and within a few hours a pair of burying beetles has found it. They work through the night. The two of them drag the body down into the…
Somewhere in a pension fund's accounts there is a line for property: warehouses, offices, retail parks. It is a large line, and it is the part of the portfolio that cannot be moved when a river comes…
Twelve geologists, six months, a thousand square kilometers of hillside. That was the price of mapping by hand what two rainstorms did to Emilia-Romagna in May 2023. Tens of thousands of slopes gave…
The case for cooling the planet deliberately rests on a reassuring piece of arithmetic. Reflect a little more sunlight back into space, and the global average temperature comes down. The arithmetic…
More than four and a half billion years ago, a lump of ice and dust in the outer Solar System got warm enough to melt inside. Water seeped through the rock, dissolved what it could, and eventually…
Nobody has ever watched a black hole's jet move. The plasma thrown out of the quasar 3C 345, in the constellation Hercules, has been under observation for half a century, but always as stills, an…
A farm in central Nebraska does not fail in an average year. What empties an account is the gap between one season and the next: the bad year that arrives after two good ones, when the loan was…
You get talking to two people you have never met before, and within a few minutes the three of you discover you all know the same person. The ordinary reaction is that the world is small. A paper…
A femtosecond is a millionth of a billionth of a second, and for chemistry it is the natural unit: atoms in a molecule take tens or hundreds of femtoseconds to rearrange. Electrons are quicker. They…