USGS Scientists Race to Sample Kilauea Crater Deposits Before Lava Buries Them Forever
A Narrow Window Into Volcanic History It was a mission with a ticking clock. On July 2, a team of federal scientists descended by helicopter into one of the most geologically dynamic places on Earth — the crater of an actively erupting Hawaiian volcano —…
Japan’s Seafloor Is Hiding the World’s Richest Gold Deposit Inside Fool’s Gold
Gold You Can’t See, in a Place You Can’t Reach In a submerged volcanic crater off the southeastern coast of Japan, researchers have identified black smoker chimneys and hydrothermal mounds actively forging vast quantities of gold — and not just the kind you can see….
We’ve Explored Nearly 70 Years of Ocean Depths and Seen Almost Nothing
A Frontier Hiding in Plain Sight Humanity has sent cameras to the Moon, Mars, Venus, and the outer planets — but on Earth itself, there is still a larger frontier that has barely been looked at directly. That frontier is the deep ocean floor, and…
Solitary and Sometimes Cannibalistic, Octopuses Are Rewriting the Rules of Intelligence
The Brainiest Loners in the Ocean For decades, scientists believed they had a solid answer to one of biology’s most fascinating questions: why do some animals evolve big brains? The leading theory — known as the social brain hypothesis — held that intelligence is essentially…
Webb Telescope Turns Four and Reveals a Galaxy Forged by Cosmic Catastrophe
A Birthday Gift From the Cosmos July 2026 marks four years since NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope images were first revealed to the general public, marking a new era for astronomy. And NASA chose to celebrate in spectacular fashion. To mark this anniversary of the…
NASA’s New Horizons Wakes After Nearly a Year of Deep Space Slumber
A Wake-Up Call From 5.9 Billion Miles Away NASA announced on July 7, 2026, that its New Horizons spacecraft has resumed active operations after completing its longest hibernation period to date — emerging from a 321-day sleep in good health. The news came as a…
SpaceX Sends 81 Satellites to Orbit and Quietly Crosses a Historic Milestone
A Rocket That’s Been There, Done That — 11 Times SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base early Tuesday morning carrying 81 satellites to sun-synchronous orbit — and among them, quietly tucked into the manifest, was something that had never flown…
A Splashy Claim That the Universe Is Lopsided Just Fell Apart
A Bombshell Paper That Shook Cosmology For a brief, dizzying moment, it looked like one of the most fundamental assumptions in all of science was wrong. In a study published in *Nature* at the end of June 2026, coauthors Francesco Sylos Labini and Marco Galoppo…
Montblanc’s New Iced Sea Diver Looks Beaten Up — And That’s the Point
Born Distressed, Not Damaged The Montblanc Iced Sea Automatic Date 0 Oxygen ref. MB137541, priced at €5,300 / US$5,600 / £4,600, is not your average black watch — because it isn’t fully black. There is something about the textured surface that makes it appear a…
How the Death of Mars’s Magnetic Field Turned a Living World Into a Desert
A Planet That Once Had Everything Four and a half billion years ago, Mars boasted a thick atmosphere and abundant surface water — conditions that could have hosted life. It was, by all scientific reckoning, a world with a genuine shot at biology. What happened…
