Science

New research using stochastic modeling has resolved a 237-year-old historical mystery: the devastating smallpox outbreak that swept through Indigenous Australian communities in 1789 was almost certainly caused by British colonizers, specifically, vials of dried smallpox scabs carried aboard the First Fleet. The study, published July 9 in Nature Human Behaviour by researchers from Flinders University […]

It’s Time to Treat Pandemics as Threats to National Security, Experts Argue The world spends enormous sums on national security, on militaries, intelligence agencies, and border protection. But the most damaging threat of the 21st century so far, according to a growing number of public health experts, has been biological, not military. And the tools […]

The Fight to Save the UK’s Rare Chalk Streams, Among the Rarest Ecosystems on Earth There are roughly 200 chalk streams in the world. Of those, about 160 are in England. The rest are spread across northern Europe. There is nothing else quite like them. Fed by groundwater that has been filtered through chalk aquifers […]

The Hidden Death Toll of the 2025 Iberian Blackout: +167 Excess Deaths in Spain On April 28, 2025, the Iberian Peninsula experienced one of the most widespread power outages in modern European history. For roughly ten hours, mainland Spain and Portugal lost virtually all electrical power, affecting more than 50 million people. Communications networks failed. […]

The Science of Foresight: How Researchers Can Future-Proof Their Work Every research program is a bet on the future. A scientist who devotes years to a particular line of inquiry, a funder who backs one field over another, an institution that builds infrastructure around a specific technology, all are making assumptions about what will matter, […]

Bristol Myers Squibb Builds Pharma’s Largest AI Supercomputer With NVIDIA Bristol Myers Squibb announced on Monday that it is buying the latest-generation computing system from NVIDIA to support the use of artificial intelligence across its drug discovery and development operations — a move the company says will make it the owner of the largest AI […]

Hidden Time-Capsule of UK Biodiversity: 10,000 Plant Specimens Unlocked After Centuries In a locked room at the Royal Agricultural University in Cirencester, Gloucestershire, sits a collection of more than 10,000 dried and pressed plant specimens. Some date back to 1797. One was collected by a geologist who corresponded with Charles Darwin. Until now, the only […]

Inside Japan’s Daring Asteroid Flyby: Hayabusa2’s 800-Meter Brush With Torifune When JAXA engineer Yuya Mimasu proposed flying Hayabusa2 within 800 meters of an unknown asteroid, the response from the mission’s science team was immediate and emphatic: “No, it’s too dangerous.” A typical asteroid flyby keeps a cautious distance of 100 kilometers. At a closing speed […]

A Lost Branch of Australia’s Marsupials Discovered: Meet the Keeunamorphia Australia’s marsupials, kangaroos, koalas, wombats, Tasmanian devils, are among the most distinctive animals on Earth. For decades, paleontologists believed they all descended from a single ancestral lineage that diversified after Australia split from Antarctica roughly 35 million years ago. The fossil record told a relatively […]

How Coffee Fights Stress and Aging: A Hidden Cellular Switch Discovered For decades, large observational studies have linked coffee drinking to a striking range of health benefits, lower risks of Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, metabolic disorders, and even longer overall lifespan. But the biological mechanism behind these associations has remained stubbornly unclear. Coffee contains hundreds […]