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Anyone who has tried to answer a serious biomedical question knows the problem is rarely a shortage of information. It is that the information sits in too many places at once: one database for genes,…
Every clock is, at heart, a thing that ticks at a rate you can count on. A pendulum swings; a quartz crystal vibrates; in the best atomic clocks, electrons jump between two energy levels exactly so…
Somewhere in the galaxy, particles get flung to energies that dwarf anything a human-built collider can reach. Astronomers call the engines behind them PeVatrons, sources able to accelerate cosmic…
The usual story about antibiotic resistance ends with a plea for new drugs, and the pipeline for those is famously thin. A study out of two American labs points at a different move: not inventing a…
On 28 May 2025, a mountainside above the Lötschental valley in southern Switzerland gave way. Rock had been loading onto the Birchgletscher for years; when the glacier finally failed, roughly 9.57…
Chemists have a name for the kind of molecule they had never quite caught in space: a true sugar, a carbohydrate with the right skeleton to slot into the chemistry of living things. Simpler…
Spider fangs do not look like they should have a fossil record. They are delicate, hollow and mostly made of the kind of soft tissue that rots long before it can turn to stone. So the question of…
In quantum technology, sometimes the most valuable thing in a material is a flaw. The most famous example lives in diamond, where a missing carbon atom paired with a nitrogen atom creates a defect…
In 2010, a severe drought gripped the Amazon, one of a run of exceptional dry spells this century that have tested the world's largest rainforest. Droughts like that are grim to live through and, for…
In the airless mud of a river near Libreville, in Gabon, a single cell keeps finding its way down. It is a ciliate: a fringe of beating hairs, a nucleus, the sort of organism a high-school microscope…
Most humanoid robots are designed in the order you would expect. First, the engineers settle the body: the length of the limbs, where the motors sit, and how much each joint can push. Only then does…
In the Botanical Garden of the University of Potsdam grows a South African plant called Wachendorfia thyrsiflora, the butterfly lily. Look into one of its yellow flowers and you find a small…