Hitting an asteroid in the wrong place could accidentally make it more likely to impact Earth buradaki/Shutterstock If an asteroid was heading for a deadly impact with Earth, could we nudge it off course safely without making the situation worse? Yes, thanks to a new system for calculating the perfect spot to smack a spacecraft…
September 11, 2025 2 min read Early Experiments Show Fast-Acting Antidote Targets Carbon Monoxide Poisoning A study in mice and on human blood uses a new protein to snag carbon monoxide before it latches onto blood cells By Sara Novak edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier A new antidote is designed to rapidly address carbon monoxide…
Archaeological excavations near Aldborough, UK, are helping us understand life after Roman occupation R Ferraby & M.J. Millet When the Roman Empire withdrew from Britain, the result was not chaos and economic collapse. The metals industry in what is now northern England continued and even expanded in the subsequent centuries, according to an archaeological record…
Fermented foods like kimchi can have benefits for your body and brain Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images FermentTim Spector (Jonathan Cape (UK); US TBC) There are two reasons why humans became interested in fermentation: preservation and pleasure. Before refrigeration, the process let us store drinks like mead for months when water could be deadly. And…
Illustration of two black holes merging and sending gravitational waves across the cosmos Maggie Chiang for Simons Foundation Stephen Hawking’s 50-year-old theorem on how black holes merge together has been successfully tested thanks to huge advances in gravitational wave astronomy, which helped astronomers catch the waves caused by an unusually powerful collision as they passed…
Crystals hidden inside dinosaur eggs at a famous fossil site are giving scientists a chance to do something that’s long proven elusive: figure out how old the ancient nests really are. Finding these fossilized eggs’ true shelf life makes it possible to connect large-scale changes in climate to tiny shifts in the structure of eggshells,…
Soon after psychiatrist Leo Kanner first identified autism in the 1940s, he and his colleagues proposed a simple explanation for its cause: mothers’ “lack of genuine warmth” toward their children. Being raised by “refrigerator mothers,” the researchers explained, was what caused autistic people’s difficulties with social communication and sensory processing and their repetitive behaviors and…
Shutterstock/JavierLizarazo These days, our lives revolve around the digital world. Money, culture, news, gossip – all of it lives there. Generative artificial intelligence is the biggest story in the world, but could you point to where that technology is physically located? The material world just isn’t where the action is. And yet, despite appearances, we…
September 10, 2025 5 min read New Black Hole Measurements Show More Ways Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein Were Right Spacetime ripples from a black hole collision across the cosmos have confirmed weird aspects of black hole physics By Clara Moskowitz edited by Lee Billings An illustration imagines GW250114, a powerful collision between two black…
Illustration of antibodies attacking influenza virus particles Science Photo Library/Alamy A cocktail of antibodies could give us a new weapon to fight seasonal flu and new strains that cause pandemics. The mix protected mice from various strains of influenza, but hasn’t yet been tested in humans. Most flu treatments and vaccines rely on prompting the…
