Articles

For years, the perovskite polariton laser has had an awkward secret: to make it shine, you had to shine another laser at it. That is not a small caveat. A laser you can only switch on with a second,…

On a night in April 2025, something bright tore across the sky over the Adriatic. To the few people who looked up in time, it was a fireball: a fragment of interplanetary rock burning through the…

Step into a rainforest and the soundscape can feel infinite, thousands of species layering whistles, buzzes, and rippling phrases into a wall of noise. That impression of endless variety is, in a…

Ancient DNA is a discipline built on luck. It survives best in cold, dry, stable ground, which is why so much of what we know about deep human history comes from Europe and northern Asia. Japan, warm…

Deep in a maze of tunnels, a single female runs the whole operation. She is the only naked mole-rat in her colony who breeds. The dozens of other females around her, her daughters and sisters, live…

Ask someone to memorize a shopping list and then say it back in any order, and a few reliable habits show up. People tend to blurt out the last few items first. They often start strong on the first…

High in Nepal's Shorong region sits a glacier that scientists have been watching longer than almost any other in the Himalayas. It has no famous name, only a code from an old survey: AX010. For…

Rarely does nature set up its own controlled experiment. At Qooqqup Sermia, in the fjord country south of Narsarsuaq, it has done exactly that. A single stream of ice flows down from the interior and…

The intuitive story about landslides is simple: more rain, more slides. A century of Calabrian records tells a more unsettling one. Working in the mountainous toe of the Italian peninsula, Stefano…

For a day and a half in February 2022, Storm Eunice tore across the British Isles, the Low Countries and northern Germany, driving a red weather warning, shuttering rail networks and leaving well…

Stand at the edge of a fresh earthquake rupture, and the ground tells you exactly what happened. Cracks fan across the desert floor. The surface is offset, sometimes by metres, along a ragged seam…

For decades the Aral Sea has stood as a monument to what human engineering can undo. Once the fourth-largest lake on Earth, it began shrinking in the 1960s when Soviet planners diverted the rivers…