Science

The first ancient smallpox genomes ever recovered from the Americas come from two people buried in northern Chile during an epidemic that no written record mentions. The genomes do more than confirm that European colonization carried the virus across the Atlantic. They capture variola, the virus that causes smallpox, at a strange moment in its […]

Every animal faces a fundamental biological problem: finding enough food to survive. The locations of reliable food sources, the taste of ripe fruit, the smell of a safe meal; these are among the most useful things a brain can remember. A growing body of research has hinted that the gut and the brain cooperate to […]

Night vision goggles flatten the world into green. The reason is not that infrared light lacks color information. It is that conventional devices throw that information away, converting everything into shades of brightness. A team at the Beijing Institute of Technology, led by Xin Tang and Ge Mu, has now built a device that keeps […]

The antibodies are everywhere and rising. The disease is far rarer. And no one can fully explain the gap between them. That is the strange position of alpha-gal syndrome, the tick-borne allergy to red meat, at a moment when its geographic footprint is expanding on several continents and its case counts are climbing. Scientists understand […]

On August 5 at 06:34 UTC, a spent Falcon 9 upper stage weighing roughly 3,900 kilograms will strike the lunar surface near Einstein Crater at 2.43 kilometers per second, releasing 11.8 gigajoules of kinetic energy. The rocket body is a leftover from the January 2025 launch that carried Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost-1 lander and ispace’s […]

Chemistry has a new answer to an old question: can the rare earths, the f-block metals that fill the lower rows of the periodic table, do what iron does with oxygen? For decades the answer appeared to be no. Iron and its transition-metal neighbors bind oxygen through the sharing of electrons in directional bonds, a […]

For more than twenty years, the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon was the most promising crack in the Standard Model of particle physics. Every measurement of the muon’s magnetic wobble seemed slightly larger than the theory predicted, and the gap held steady at around 3.7 standard deviations, tantalizingly short of the 5-sigma threshold required […]

In early March, most of England’s reservoirs were brimming. Two months of relentless winter rain had replenished supplies depleted during the 2025 drought, and water managers breathed cautiously. By mid-July, seven English regions were in official drought, more than 20 million people faced hosepipe bans, and the Environment Agency was warning that parts of Devon […]

Every few weeks, MIT Technology Review publishes its AI Hype Index, a thermometer check on the industry’s fever pitch. The July 2026 edition, written by staff writer Charlotte Jee, carries a telling subtitle: Unsexy AI. It is a concept that deserves more than a passing headline. Look past the usual noise, the sentience claims, the […]

Humanity has never been closer to eradicating polio. It is also, arguably, never been closer to watching the entire enterprise collapse. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) now administers more than one billion doses of vaccine to roughly 400 million children every single year. In 2023, the entire planet recorded just 12 confirmed cases of […]