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On any beach, the sea spends the day walking up the sand and back down again. To the people who use satellites to track eroding coastlines, that walk is a nuisance: before an image of a waterline can…
A thunderclap does two things at once. It rolls across the sky, and it pushes down. Part of that acoustic energy hits the ground and keeps going, converting into seismic waves that ripple through the…
Put a price on asking for help and people ask for less of it. That part of a new experiment out of the University of California, Irvine behaved exactly as you would expect. The interesting part came…
In the first week of April 2025, moorland in western and northern Britain was burning, weeks before the start of the fire season in southern Europe. By August, Galicia had suffered the largest…
A fruit fly can find the one overripe banana in a kitchen using a brain smaller than a poppy seed. It gets no training set and no chance to rehearse. Its solution looks unfashionable next to modern…
The spectra had been sitting in a public archive for years, taken for someone else's project, a planet hunt at the European Southern Observatory in Chile. On night after night in the spring of 2018…
Stand on the daylit side of TOI-561 b and there would be nothing underfoot but rock hot enough to run like water. It is a rocky planet a little larger than Earth, orbiting so close to its star that a…
The night of 20–21 June 2024 left the French Alpine village of La Bérarde half buried. The Étançons river, swollen and carrying rock, came through the Écrins massif hamlet and filled it with debris;…
Server racks do not usually need plumbing. The one at the National University of Singapore, demonstrated to guests on 6 August 2026 and announced on 17 August, has it in every unit: pumps, filters, a…
For decades, the story of Alzheimer's has been told from the outside in: sticky plaques between neurons, tangled fibers within them, a slow siege on the brain's wiring. But the plaques and tangles…
Think of the jet stream as a motorway for weather. Most days the traffic moves briskly west to east, and one system gives way to the next before either can do much damage. But every so often the flow…
Stand anywhere on the Tibetan Plateau and the word that comes to mind is flat: a cold, thin-aired tableland averaging more than 4,500 metres above sea level, earning its nickname as the Roof of the…