October 7, 2025 4 min read South Africa’s Coast Is Rising—And Scientists Have a New Explanation Why Human water management contributes to sinking land across the globe, and it may also be responsible for an unexpected rise By Avery Schuyler Nunn edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier Land rising along South Africa’s coast may be closely…
John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis share the 2025 Nobel prize in physics JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP via Getty Images The 2025 Nobel prize in physics has been awarded to John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis for their work on showing how quantum particles can mysteriously tunnel through matter, a process that helped produce the superconducting quantum…
October 6, 2025 3 min read The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics Goes to Researchers Who Showed Quantum Tunneling on a Chip John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work showing how bizarre microscopic quantum effects can infiltrate our large-scale, everyday world By Lee…
A supermoon in Colorado Springs in 2024 Parker Seibold/The Gazette via AP Photo/Alamy The next few months will be a wonderful time for moon lovers, because we have four supermoons coming up – in a row. These exceptional full moons are the Hunter’s moon in October, the Beaver moon in November, the aptly named (for…
The idea of genetically modifying wild lions divides opinion Andrewfel/Shutterstock Should we genetically modify wild lions? Of course not, might be your instant response. But what if lions were being wiped out by a devastating disease introduced by people? What if the genetic change was a tiny tweak that makes them immune to this disease,…
A few years ago, my dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, just like his older brother and his mum before him. Slowly, his personality began to ebb away. Now, at the age of 75, his cognitive decline is accelerating: he no longer recognises his granddaughters, for instance, and he lives in a near-constant state of…
Black holes are extremely powerful matter distributors NASA Image Collection/Alamy Unexpectedly violent black holes may have caused the mystery of the missing cosmic matter. Most of the universe is filled with mysterious dark matter, but even ordinary matter has stumped cosmologists. Some of this normal matter – made up of particles called baryons – seemed…
This story has been updated. The human immune system is our body’s primary line of defense against harmful microbes, viruses and other invaders—but that defense line can sometimes run amok and attack healthy cells. This is the basis of many autoimmune diseases, from cancer to rheumatoid arthritis to type 1 diabetes. The 2025 Nobel Prize…
Artwork of two planets orbiting a white dwarf star JULIAN BAUM/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Planets orbiting dead stars known as white dwarfs might be able to remain habitable thanks to general relativity subtly altering their motion. When stars like our sun run out of fuel, they expand and become red giants before expelling their outer layers,…
Work on peacemakers in the immune system won the 2025 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. The peacemakers are regulatory T cells, a type of immune cell that calms the immune system after it has finished fighting infection or healing a wound. These special T cells also prevent the immune system from attacking the body….
