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…
Company noted for building quantum annealers now also making gate-based hardware. D-Wave is a bit of an oddity in the quantum computing space, having been founded back in the last century. And its initial offering wasn’t a quantum computer like those being developed by IBM or Google. Instead, the…
Also: Cyborg diving suits for cockroaches, why sleepy sperm whales blow bubbles, Betelgeuse’s companion star. It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped…
“We believe that a capture of Swift, an attempted capture of Swift, is very much in the cards.” One week ago, more than 200 miles above the Earth, a refrigerator-size satellite making its way toward an attempted rescue of NASA’s $500 million Swift gamma-ray observatory suddenly spun out of…
Tracking smells in turbulent air takes a keen sense of direction and sharp memory. A fruit fly hunting a piece of rotting fruit or a mate navigates by smell, following plumes of odor. Out in the wild, turbulent air swirls these plumes into a chaotic, broken landscape—dense chemical filaments…
Some group with no modern descendants contributed a lot to our genomes. When the history of our ancestry is written, the fact that we’ve interbred with some of our closest relatives, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, will have a central role. And it will be tempting to write it as…
Wavelength and intensity in the infrared are translated into colors in the visible. Human eyes don’t register the infrared portion of the light spectrum because infrared photons don’t carry enough energy to trigger the signaling pathway inside our light-sensing cells. But we’ve been able to make devices that give…
