Science

Ripple bugs’ nimble movements on the surface of water inspired a robot with automatically unfurling fans on its feet.

When we talk about carbon dioxide, the narrative is almost always that of a modern-day morality play. We hear about gigatons of CO2 emitted, about rising global temperatures and about the dire, unheeded warnings of climate scientists. In these tales, CO2 often seems less like a mute, inert molecule and more like an evil supervillain—a…

Open-pit mining at Kennecott Copper Mine, also called Bingham Canyon Mine, in Utah Witold Skrypczak/Alamy The leftover ore discarded by US mines is packed with key minerals – enough to provide virtually all of the raw material needed to build clean energy technologies. Recovering just a fraction of these minerals could meet the country’s growing…

Light pollution makes birds work overtime. A behavioral analysis of nearly 600 bird species suggests that light pollution from human development can lengthen the time birds spend singing by nearly an hour per day, researchers report August 21 in Science. The extension’s magnitude took the researchers by surprise. “While we expected some behavioral adjustment to…

A few months before the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) in July, a three-person team at OpenAI made a long bet that they could use the competition’s brutally tough problems to train an artificial intelligence model to think on its own for hours so that it was capable of writing math proofs. Their goal wasn’t…

An artwork in Geneva, Switzerland, where talks on a global plastic treaty took place last week FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images On 14 August, exhausted UN delegates filed into a windowless plenary hall, after hours of intensive debate and little sleep, to watch their hopes of a global treaty to tackle plastic pollution evaporate. The…

At 3 a.m. on a crisp May night in Chile, all seemed well with the world’s largest digital camera. Until it didn’t. Inside the newly built Vera C. Rubin Observatory, site project scientist Sandrine Thomas was running tests when a flat line representing the camera’s temperature started to spike. “That looks bad,” she thought. She…

On Monday Texas health officials said the state’s massive measles outbreak, which killed two unvaccinated children, had come to an end. It’s the close of the largest single measles outbreak that the U.S. has seen since 2000, when health agencies declared the disease eliminated in the country. In recent years vaccination rates have wavered, and…

Are there unseen planets in our solar system? Peter Jurik/Alamy Somewhere at the edge of the solar system a new Earth-sized world might be lurking, dubbed Planet Y. Astronomers have long proposed that there might be hidden planets beyond the Kuiper belt, a region of icy objects that is home to Pluto. Some of the…

Anabelle Terry, a slender, self-possessed 13-year-old, has heard the peanut butter story her entire life. At two and a half she ate nuts for the first time. Her mother, Victoria, had made a little treat: popcorn drizzled with melted caramel, chocolate and peanut butter. Anabelle gobbled it down. “And afterward, I felt really sick,” she…