“It’s the strongest evidence yet that particles dominated by a glueball component can exist in nature.” Physicists with the Beijing Spectrometer III (BES III) experiment have uncovered convincing new evidence of the existence of so-called glueballs, an elusive composite particle made entirely of gluons predicted by quantum theory. The…
In a recent study, evolution gets even messier than usual. The Cambrian explosion may have been fueled by poop. The first animals on Earth emerged about 600 million years ago, and 60 million years later, those simple early animals evolved in wildly different directions, branching out into a diverse…
Hot hours of summer could triple in the coming decades. Global warming is leading to more extremely hot weather. There is perhaps no more obvious consequence of climate change. But changing how we analyze this problem can still help scientists think about it in a different way that may…
fMRI scans show happiness, fear, anger, and sadness have distinct brain activity patterns in doggy brains. Any dog owner would tell you that their canine companions are attuned to their humans’ emotional state and respond accordingly. Scientists have performed fMRI scans on dogs and identified a specific brain region…
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…
