The four-foot-tall emperor penguin of Antarctica may be the best-known member of the penguin family, but it is far from the only one. Seventeen other penguin species live throughout the Southern Hemisphere, and many inhabit isolated islands that are difficult for scientists to reach and study. That remoteness may help explain how an entire gentoo … Read more
Protein interactions reveal hidden wiring of the genome
The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on August 17, 2026, reconstructs environmental conditions in Yellowstone’s largest thermal area since the end of the last ice age. Whitlock et al. (2026) examined sediment records from five lakes and compared the findings with regional paleoclimatic simulations developed independently to investigate … Read more
Literary records indicate that ancient China had five types of physical punishments. These included nasal amputation, although researchers had yet to find archaeological evidence of criminals subjected to this punishment… until now. In 2018, a team of Chinese archaeologists inspected an ancient cemetery in Sanmexia, Henan province. Of the many samples they recovered, one female … Read more
This cookie is made from waste plant materials and plastic and could feed humans everywhere, from submarines to spaceships. (SIU Carbondale Communications) When you pull out your favorite cookie recipe, you probably won’t find plastic as one of the ingredients, but scientists have found a way to transform your trash into treats that could help … Read more
The moon’s surface experienced a violent encounter with a comet or asteroid, and it has a massive battle scar to prove it. The space rock, estimated to be the size of a three- to six-story-tall building, crashed into the moon’s eastern edge two years ago, between April 11 and May 22, 2024, although researchers did … Read more
Around 631,000 years ago — a geological blink of an eye — catastrophe unfolded in what is now north-western Wyoming, US. During what is thought to have been a series of immense volcanic eruptions, life within hundreds of kilometres of the blasts was shattered. Ash was dispersed across much of North America and the effects … Read more
The Sun is approximately 4.6 billion years old and is about halfway through its main sequence lifespan. The popular conception holds that the destruction of the Earth will occur when the Sun becomes a red giant in about 5,000,000,000 years, but the Earth may become uninhabitable billions of years earlier, not due to a sudden … Read more
Researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) have unveiled the world’s first zero-degradation elastocaloric cooling device. The team claims their innovation delivers long-lasting, eco-friendly cooling, maintaining stable performance even over an impressive one million operating cycles. Powered by a fatigue-resistant solid-state coolant, this innovation is expected to usher in highly efficient … Read more
Alexander Du, a 17-year-old student from Sewickley, Pennsylvania, has been named the 2026 Presidential AI Challenge National Champion for inventing IRIS, an AI-powered wearable device designed to help blind and visually impaired people navigate their environment. The teen built the $170 system after watching his grandmother struggle to navigate the world differently after losing her … Read more