The Perseid Meteor Shower Has Begun and 2026 Could Be One of the Best Years Yet
A Summer Sky Show Is Underway If you’ve been waiting for an excuse to step outside after dark, this is it. It’s a great week to spot “Earthshine,” a special kind of light on the moon’s surface, with the naked eye, just as the annual…
Meet the 25-Year-Old Building India’s First Private Reusable Spaceplane
A Childhood Dream Turned Aerospace Startup Sree Supranayi Kanamarlapudi dreamed of becoming an astronaut as a child. She kept that dream alive, eventually earning a B.Tech in Aerospace Engineering. Most 25-year-olds are just finding their footing in a career. Kanamarlapudi is building a spaceplane. She…
One Pound of Rock Just Revealed a Vanished Planet From the Solar System’s Violent Dawn
A Desert Rock With a Billion-Year-Old Secret A one-pound rock found in the Sahara in 2019 has become evidence for something much larger than itself: a vanished planetary body from the first years of the solar system. It sounds like science fiction, but researchers say…
Humanity Is Just 23 Minutes Old on Earth’s 4.5-Billion-Year Calendar
The Clock That Changes Everything A planet that has existed for about 4.5 billion years can be placed inside a single familiar object — a calendar year — and in that calendar, almost everything recognizably human happens late. Very late. It’s one of the most…
A Jaw Smaller Than a Thumbnail Is Rewriting Lizard Prehistory
A Fossil the Size of a Fingernail It is a partial left lower jaw measuring less than 9 millimeters long — yet despite its tiny size, it preserves 12 teeth and evidence that the animal would have carried as many as 18 teeth in its…
Starless and Alive: How Rogue Planet Moons Could Harbor Life for Billions of Years
Life Without a Sun Everything we thought we knew about where life can exist just got a little more complicated. A landmark study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society has found that moons orbiting so-called “rogue planets” — worlds cast out…
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….
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 —…
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…
