Science

There is a peculiar circularity at the heart of a new study published this week on MetaArXiv. The paper, by Adrian Barnett of Queensland University of Technology and Matt Spick of the University of Surrey, argues that academic articles accompanied by open peer review reports are significantly less likely to be retracted than those published […]

For decades, paleontologists have wrestled with a nagging inconsistency in the story of how the dinosaurs died. The asteroid that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago near what is now Chicxulub, Mexico, was unquestionably catastrophic. It carved a 180-kilometer (112-mile) crater, triggered earthquakes, and launched a plume of vaporized rock into the upper atmosphere. […]

Reference: Callaway, E. Nature News, 29 July 2026. DOI: 10.1038/d41586-026-02312-y Primary source: Conard, N., Janas, A. & Zeidi, M. in Archäologische Ausgrabungen in Baden-Wurttemberg 2025, 45-52 (2026) Deep in the Swabian Jura of southwestern Germany, inside the limestone chambers of Hohle Fels Cave, archaeologists have spent decades recovering evidence of humanity’s cognitive origins. The latest […]

On July 28, a healthy volunteer in the United Kingdom became the first person ever to receive an experimental vaccine against the Bundibugyo ebolavirus. That single injection represents a remarkable feat of speed: just 68 days after the World Health Organization declared the ongoing outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. But it also […]

A collaboration of researchers at Kyushu University has published a study in Scientific Reports that flips an old assumption about aging muscle on its head. The familiar story goes like this: as we age, key signaling proteins dwindle, muscles lose their regenerative spark, and the slow slide into sarcopenia begins. The new work, led by […]

In early July, researchers at Anthropic published what may be the most technically striking result yet in the contested field of artificial consciousness. Their paper, A global workspace in language models, demonstrated that Claude, their large language model, has spontaneously developed an internal reasoning arena: a structured computational space where information from across the network […]

At 4:27 PM on July 28, 2026, the ground beneath Kumamoto City in southern Kyushu shook at a violence that Japan’s seismic scale cannot measure beyond its maximum. The Japan Meteorological Agency rated it Shindo 7. Within half an hour, the second floor of the Aeon Mall Kumamoto in Kashima Town collapsed after a gas […]

On a late July afternoon in 2026, a NASA ER-2 research aircraft lifted off from Great Falls, Montana, climbed to an altitude of 21 kilometers (13 miles), and pointed its nose toward wildfire smoke boiling off the Oregon landscape. The plane carried no passengers, no oxygen masks, no cockpit windows. What it carried was a […]

The human immune system is the product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution. It can recognize and neutralize an almost limitless variety of pathogens, remember invaders it has seen before, and coordinate an elaborate cascade of cellular defenses. It is also, by evolutionary standards, agonizingly slow. Consider the mathematics of the arms race. […]

On a quiet Cheshire plain south of Manchester, a 90-meter (295-foot) white steel bowl has been listening to the universe for nearly 70 years. The Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank Observatory has tracked Sputnik, monitored Soviet missiles during the Cold War, mapped the structure of distant galaxies, and appeared in both The Hitchhiker’s Guide to […]