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Energy inside molecules does not simply teleport from one place to the next. It has to be carried, and some kinds of energy are far harder to carry than others. The stubborn case is the "triplet," a…
A museum drawer of songbird skeletons does not look like a story. It looks like a lot of small, pale, similar bones. Sparrows, finches, warblers, thrushes: the group biologists call Passeriformes…
At 854 metres up in the southern Norwegian mountains, Lake Tesse holds a puzzle that has nothing to do with how the fish got caught and everything to do with how they got there at all. When the ice…
Stretch a rubber band and it eventually snaps. Pour honey and it just keeps flowing, however hard you pull. That contrast is one of the first things anyone learns about matter: solids can fracture,…
Most of the plastic that enters the ocean does not stay at sea. It comes back to land, washing onto beaches, piling up in mangroves, fouling the same coastlines it drifted away from. The hard…
The pitch for AI agent teams is intuitive, which is part of why it sells so well. If one language model can draft an answer, surely two can catch each other's mistakes, and a whole committee of them…
Green tree ants are not the kind of prey most spiders go looking for. They swarm, they bite, they spray formic acid, and they coordinate. A spider that tried to wrestle one into a web would, more…
Watch a fruit fly hover over a bowl of ripe peaches, then a crane fly stumble across a windowpane, then a midge hang in a cloud at dusk. They look like utterly different aviators: different sizes,…
For years, the search for atmospheres on rocky exoplanets has mostly returned bad news. The small worlds that orbit red dwarfs sit close to stars that flare hard and blast them with radiation, and…
At the bottom of the world, on the islands of the Fuegian Archipelago, a rodent from another hemisphere has been reshaping the forest for the better part of a century. The North American beaver was…
Ask a structure-prediction model to work out how two molecules fit together, and much of what happens next is closer to guesswork than most people assume. The model generates a crowd of candidate…
Some 5,500 years ago, on the banks of a river that feeds Lake Baikal in southeast Siberia, small bands of hunter-gatherers began burying their dead in unusual numbers, and the dead were unusually…