Science

Psychology says people who carry one mug to the kitchen instead of waiting to carry four aren’t tidy or impatient — they’re spending real physical effort to stop holding the task in their head, and researchers have a word for it: precrastination

Psychology says people who carry one mug to the kitchen instead of waiting to carry four aren't tidy or impatient — they're spending real physical effort to stop holding the task in their head, and researchers have a word for it: precrastination

It seems like the least efficient way to clean a table. One cup, one trip, round trip, when waiting five more minutes would allow the same person to carry all four at once and reduce the total number of trips by three quarters. Efficiency experts would wince. And yet, almost everyone has done exactly this, … Read more

On 2 July 2026, NASA’s Perseverance rover captured Earth disappearing behind Phobos from the surface of Mars — the first time in history a camera on another planet has watched our world vanish behind another object.

On 2 July 2026, NASA's Perseverance rover captured Earth disappearing behind Phobos from the surface of Mars — the first time in history a camera on another planet has watched our world vanish behind another object.

From the western edge of Jezero Crater, Earth was not a blue world on July 2, 2026. It was a single bright pixel, 314 million kilometers away, moving across the night sky of Mars. A thin crescent of Phobos approached from the other direction. Then, for a few moments in a sequence of images taken … Read more

Around eight per cent of your DNA was left behind by ancient viruses, and one of those stolen viral genes is what builds the placenta — meaning every mammal alive, including you, was born because a virus infected an ancestor and never left.

Around eight per cent of your DNA was left behind by ancient viruses, and one of those stolen viral genes is what builds the placenta — meaning every mammal alive, including you, was born because a virus infected an ancestor and never left.

“Are you sure they’re not twins?” The question came from a woman I’d never spoken to before, both of us standing on our pedals in the middle of class in a dark spin studio that smelled like clove deodorant and someone else’s protein shake. I had been pregnant with my second daughter for six months … Read more

Blue Origin adding second pad to Cape Canaveral launch complex amid rocket explosion repairs

Blue Origin adding second pad to Cape Canaveral launch complex amid rocket explosion repairs

Blue Origin plans to return its Florida launch site to a dual-deck facility to support its larger, more powerful New Glenn “9×4” rocket, which is still in development. As facility repairs continue following the explosion of one of Blue Origin’s “7×2” New Glenn rockets during testing at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Launch Complex-36 in … Read more

RNA is supposed to fall apart within hours, yet researchers have now read it from a mammoth frozen in Siberian permafrost 39,000 years ago — and the transcripts caught his muscle tissue in the middle of a stress response

RNA is supposed to fall apart within hours, yet researchers have now read it from a mammoth frozen in Siberian permafrost 39,000 years ago — and the transcripts caught his muscle tissue in the middle of a stress response

RNA is the molecule that biologists generally consider disposable. Unlike DNA, which is designed to be a long-term stable file, RNA is made, used and broken down by a cell in a matter of hours, sometimes minutes, as part of an ordinary task: converting genetic instructions into proteins and then discarding the messenger after the … Read more

A pop-up tag on a pregnant porbeagle shark kept reporting for four days after it stopped moving like a shark — rising and falling through the water at a constant 22°C, five degrees warmer than the sea, from inside whatever had swallowed it

A pop-up tag on a pregnant porbeagle shark kept reporting for four days after it stopped moving like a shark — rising and falling through the water at a constant 22°C, five degrees warmer than the sea, from inside whatever had swallowed it

For months, the data looked like that of an ordinary shark. A pop-up satellite archive tag attached to a pregnant porbeagle shark off Cape Cod followed the animal in its usual pattern: diving deeply during the day, sometimes more than two thousand feet, and then rising back to shallower waters, roughly three hundred to two … Read more

A trail camera in British Columbia recorded a wild wolf swimming out to a buoy and hauling a fully submerged crab trap up the beach by its rope, then working the bait cup open — three minutes of footage no wild canid had ever been filmed doing

A trail camera in British Columbia recorded a wild wolf swimming out to a buoy and hauling a fully submerged crab trap up the beach by its rope, then working the bait cup open — three minutes of footage no wild canid had ever been filmed doing

The footage lasts just under three minutes. A wolf swims from a rocky shoreline on the central coast of British Columbia, grabs a floating buoy in its jaws and turns toward the beach. What he is towing is not visible from the surface: a baited crab trap, completely submerged, tied to the buoy by a … Read more

Dolphins on opposite sides of Australia, thousands of kilometres apart, appear to have independently learned to chase fish into empty seashells and tip the trapped meal into their mouths — two populations, one remarkably similar invention.

Dolphins on opposite sides of Australia, thousands of kilometres apart, appear to have independently learned to chase fish into empty seashells and tip the trapped meal into their mouths — two populations, one remarkably similar invention.

Almost 4,000 kilometers separate Shark Bay, on the west coast of Australia, from Hervey Bay, on the east coast. However, bottlenose dolphins in both places have come up with the same unusual way of catching a fish: using a large empty sea snail shell as a trap, bringing it to the surface and squeezing the … Read more

Webb found strong evidence of a Saturn-mass planet in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri A — our nearest solar twin, just 4 light-years away — then the planet seemed to disappear, sending astronomers into millions of simulated orbits to work out how it could have slipped from view.

Webb found strong evidence of a Saturn-mass planet in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri A — our nearest solar twin, just 4 light-years away — then the planet seemed to disappear, sending astronomers into millions of simulated orbits to work out how it could have slipped from view.

On a night in August 2024, the James Webb Space Telescope recorded a faint spot of mid-infrared light next to Alpha Centauri A. The source was more than 10,000 times fainter than the star and appeared about 1.5 arc seconds away, equivalent to a projected separation about twice the Earth-Sun distance. There were good reasons … Read more