Articles

Time on a synchrotron beamline is one of the scarcer resources in experimental science. These facilities (building-sized machines that whip electrons around a ring to produce intense X-rays) are…

Ask a large language model why it answered the way it did and it will happily tell you. The problem is that the answer it gives and the computation it ran are not the same thing. Somewhere inside, a…

A launch chart and an independent audit looked at the same model this week and came away telling almost opposite stories. On 26 June, OpenAI previewed GPT-5.6 "Sol," presenting its own benchmark…

A brown dwarf never quite made it as a star. Too heavy to be a planet, too light to sustain the hydrogen fusion that powers the Sun, it spends its life slowly cooling. The coldest of them, the…

Snakes are a paradox of the fossil record. There are more than 4,000 species alive today, slithering through deserts, rivers, treetops and soil on every continent but Antarctica, one of evolution's…

The lesions were the easy part. For more than a decade, biologists had watched brown bullhead catfish in Lake Memphremagog turn up with patches of blackened, malignant skin; by 2014, nearly one in…

In a volcanic corner of northeastern Catalonia, a good deal of the local disaster history had never lived in any single place. Some of it sat in government seismic catalogues. Some was buried in a…

For most of the late summer of 2023, the North Sea sat under stubborn high pressure. Clear skies, weak winds, and a shallow mixed layer let heat pile up in the top few tens of meters of water and…

For most of its life, an interstellar comet is a frozen relic drifting between the stars, its ices locked solid in the cold. Then it falls toward a sun that isn't its own and starts to breathe.…

Borderline personality disorder is one of the most stigmatized diagnoses in psychiatry, and one of the least often described in terms of biology. People living with it experience intense, unstable…

Every quantum engineer spends their career at war with the same opponent. A qubit holds its delicate state for only so long before energy bleeds away into its surroundings and the information…

The biological clock most of us picture runs on a 24-hour loop: proteins build up through the day, break down overnight, and the cycle sets the rhythm of sleep, hunger and hormones. For decades, that…