Category: Science

For decades, the fossil fuel industry had a reliable shield against legal and political accountability: uncertainty. Climate change, the argument went, was a diffuse, global phenomenon. No single storm, flood or heat wave could be pinned on any particular company’s product. Harm was everywhere and nowhere, and that ambiguity was worth more to oil producers…

Nobel Prize in Medicine Awarded to Three Scientists for Research Into Brain Activity The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to three scientists for research into brain activity, the Nobel Assembly announced Monday, opening this year’s slate of prize announcements from Stockholm. The award honors work that helps explain how the…

A survey of the unknown Science is often presented to the public as a catalogue of answers: the age of the universe, the structure of DNA, the mechanics of plate tectonics. But researchers tend to spend far less time admiring what is known than wrestling with what isn’t. A new project canvassing roughly 100 scientists…

Back to the first microsecond For a fleeting instant after the Big Bang, the universe was not made of atoms, or even of the protons and neutrons that sit inside them. It was a searing, almost unimaginably dense fluid of quarks and gluons — the fundamental building blocks of matter and the particles that glue…

When people imagine artificial intelligence transforming science, they tend to picture a single dramatic moment: a machine that wakes up one morning with a cure for cancer, or an algorithm that hands humanity a theory of everything on a silver platter. That image has powered a great deal of investment and a great deal of…

Scientists Once Calculated the Date of Doomsday—and It’s Next Month Mark your calendar: according to a paper published in the journal Science more than six decades ago, the human population of Earth becomes infinite on Friday, November 13, 2026. That date is now less than six weeks away. Fortunately for all of us, the prediction…

Seven of the nine natural systems that keep Earth habitable have now been pushed beyond safe limits, according to a new assessment that warns conditions are deteriorating rather than stabilizing. “We’re rapidly running out of time,” the report’s authors caution, describing a planet whose capacity to absorb human pressure is being steadily eroded. What are…

Few words grab attention quite like “doomsday” — especially when it is attached to a specific date, and especially when that date happens to be a Friday the 13th. So the news that researchers have pinned the label on Friday 13 November 2026 has understandably set phones buzzing and comment sections alight. Before reaching for…

Anyone who has been woken at dawn by a chorus of songbirds knows that birds can be surprisingly loud for their size. But according to new research highlighted this week, two species take avian volume to an extreme rarely matched anywhere in the animal kingdom: scientists say their calls rival the racket of a jackhammer…

China is making an unusually long-term bet on early-career researchers, offering funding packages that run for up to 15 years in a bid to attract top young scientific talent from around the world, according to a report in the South China Morning Post. The length of the commitment is the headline feature. Most competitive research…