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Zhang Qianggong was chairing a regional cryosphere meeting in Chengdu on the morning of 26 August when messages began going around a work chat group. His first thought was that it looked like an…
The people of Thame heard it before they saw it. The village sits high in Nepal's Everest region, a short walk up the valley from Namche Bazar, the trekking gateway to the Khumbu, and what came down…
A gold-coated copper plate, chilled to 10 kelvin and sitting in an ultra-high vacuum, makes a serviceable stand-in for a grain of interstellar dust. Freeze the right gases onto it, warm it slowly,…
In 2023, the German astrophotographer Marcel Drechsler was working through online hydrogen-alpha sky-survey images of a patch of Sagittarius, far off the plane of the Milky Way, when he noticed a…
A student writes her own argument and asks a chatbot to tidy the sentences. Another asks the chatbot for the argument, then rewrites every line in his own voice. Hand both essays to an AI-text…
Ask a modern weather model what Wednesday will look like and it will tell you, accurately enough that leading forecasting centers have begun running these systems operationally. Ask it what Monday…
When you sign in with a passkey, the clever part happens where you can see it: a fingerprint, a face, a phone that lights up. The part that decides whether any of it means anything happens somewhere…
For more than a century, the Maya arrived to us as a civilization without authors. Their astronomers charted Venus across generations and their scribes carved dynasties into stone, yet the people who…
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…