As research and AI-assisted papers surge, volunteer reviewers struggle to keep up. Jason Semprini was excited about his research on policies mandating that elementary school students receive the human papillomavirus vaccine. HPV causes most cases of cervical cancer, but counterintuitively, Semprini found that mandates don’t do that much to…
The massive Toba eruption seems to have had little climate impact. Mount Toba was the biggest volcanic eruption in the last 2.6 million years, and some have suggested it nearly wiped out humanity. Around 74,000 years ago, a caldera on what is now Sumatra emptied thousands of cubic kilometers…
Open source WeatherNext model can make accurate predictions with lower-resolution weather data. In October 2025, a storm brewed over the Caribbean Sea. Weather models differed on its trajectory. Would it remain weak and end up in Haiti, or would it intensify and head to Jamaica? Artificial intelligence model WeatherNext,…
Fitted with telescopes, the plane did our longest imaging of the Sun’s corona. A walk down the tarmac at the National Air and Space Museum of France is guaranteed to thrill aviation enthusiasts. Several civilian and military aircraft of the past and the present are showcased in this museum,…
Collagen and calcium work in tandem to achieve varying mechanical properties of different kinds of mucus. Snails are well-known for their mucus. The slime is highly valued as an anti-inflammatory and anti-aging ingredient in certain skin care products, and snails can secrete different kinds of mucus with properties tailored…
We expected them to be there, but they had previously been too small to see. Wherever two fluids slide past each other at different speeds, the boundary between them buckles, then curls, then rolls up into vortexes. It’s called the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, and the physics behind it was worked…
A court rules that a hold on all wind projects clearly violates the law. On Thursday, a US District Court in Oregon ordered the US government to restart the process of approving wind projects. All new wind development in the US has been on hold since August 2025, when…
The AI system makes genetically distant versions of a bacteria-killing virus. A lot of the AI work in biology has been focused on designing proteins. That’s partly because proteins do most of the business of life, catalyzing the interesting chemistry and structuring cells. So, figuring out how to make…
This may help fungi survive host scarcity and explains why infected hosts prefer the mosses as death sites. The parasitic fungi in the Cordyceps genus are a favorite subject of nature documentaries. They’ve also infiltrated popular culture via the zombie-apocalypse video game The Last of Us (2013) and its…
“The models are forecasting something outside the envelope of anything we have ever observed.” The city of Houston, where I live, has been ground zero for the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season. So far this year there have been two named storms, Arthur and Bertha, that have formed. And the…
