SCIENCE
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Plants move to get away from their decaying brethren
Plants seem stationary: they don’t skip, fly or walk around. But that doesn’t mean they don’t move. The organisms bend their roots and shoots in response to stimuli such as water, light, salt and gravity. These responsive movements, called tropisms, are crucial for plants’ survival. Now researchers have discovered a new way plants move, which they call “saprotropism”: the bending…
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Stunning video reveals the year-round dance of the sun’s corona
We’re usually not supposed to look directly at the sun except during the glorious totality of a solar eclipse. But NASA’s PUNCH mission has been staring unblinkingly at our star since June 2025. PUNCH, short for Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere, avoids frying its optics via a sunlight-blocking coronagraph that creates a permanent personal eclipse for its Narrow…
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Could Tutankhamun’s tomb hold clues to a mysterious Egyptian queen?
A growing body of research is generating renewed interest in potential hidden spaces beyond the decorated walls of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber in Egypt. Some researchers have raised the possibility that these concealed chambers—if they exist—could contain the burial place of Nefertiti, Tutankhamun’s stepmother and mother-in-law. Nefertiti was made famous by a remarkable painted bust of her head found in Tell-el…
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Mathematicians marvel, and grumble, at OpenAI’s trove of new results
It’s been two days since OpenAI’s “slop drop” of AI-generated results on 372 open math and computer science problems. Scientists are just beginning to parse through the heap and pick out the most exciting breakthroughs in their own fields. It will be months, perhaps years, before we understand just how much novel mathematics was added to the literature this week,…
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United Arab Emirates to launch spacecraft to probe seven asteroids in 2028
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is expanding its space footprint with plans to launch a probe to the further reaches of the solar system. The MBR Explorer, which is set to launch in March 2028, will visit seven different asteroids in the main asteroid belt, which lies between Mars and Jupiter. The spacecraft, which is designed to be fully autonomous,…
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This weird particle may have come from a black hole exploding in another dimension
A bizarre neutrino that crashed into Earth in February 2023 is gaining no shortage of equally bizarre explanations. About 35 times more energetic than any neutrino seen before, it was picked up by the under-construction Cubic Kilometer Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT) detector off the coast of Sicily. Some theorists have guessed it came from a well-known source of extreme astrophysical mayhem,…
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See the cool photos this Jupiter-bound spacecraft took while swinging by Earth
Early Monday morning, the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) zoomed by Earth as it prepared to slingshot itself off to the outer solar system. The flyby’s goal was to let Juice use Earth’s gravity to fine-tune its trajectory—and along the way, it snapped some pretty pictures of our planet and the moon. ESA/Juice/NavCam On supporting science journalism…
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How a horse flu crisis fueled animals rights advocacy in the U.S.
On Wednesday, October 23, 1872, a slew of articles appeared in The New York Times, The New York Herald, and The New York Sun, warning New York citizens that their city was in dire straits. In what must have struck New Yorkers like a thunderclap, the Herald ran a huge story titled “THE EPIZOOTIC,” in which readers cast their eyes…
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Watch a robot dog run a marathon faster than the average human
Hot on the heels of humanoid robots besting Usain Bolt’s record in the 100-meter sprint is a marathon-running dog bot. The quadrupedal machine, named RAIBO2, ran the full 26.2-mile marathon course in a single battery charge, finishing in four hours, 19 minutes and 52 seconds—slightly ahead of the human average. The feat shows how far researchers have come in making…
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Why human language may be intertwined with fire
When asked about the greatest innovation of humans, people will often say language or fire. A new paper suggests that these innovations may be more interlinked than we previously assumed. Understanding how human language evolved is one of the hardest problems in science to unpick, since writing is a relatively recent innovation. Also, the vocal tracts and brains of our…
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