A viral post says "the First Space War has already started and they're just not telling us." The evidence behind it is a run of fragmentation events logged by the tracking firm LeoLabs, the latest on 5 October 2026. Here is what was detected, what can and can't be told from tracking data, and what w
A Science Advances study led by Brandon Shuck of Louisiana State University images a tear opening in the Cascadia subduction zone's Nootka Fault Zone off northern Vancouver Island, where the subducting slab has already dropped about 5 kilometres — evidence, the authors argue, that subduction zones c
A University of British Columbia master's thesis turns up two sea spider species new to science in the Salish Sea — the first described there in almost a century — including a red-eyed, three-lipped species named for the hairy spines on its legs, found on scientific dives to 18 metres and confirmed
A paper led by Kenji Furuya of Japan's RIKEN institute finds that the water boiling off our solar system's third interstellar visitor, 3I/ATLAS, carries a deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio tens of times higher than any comet native to our own solar system — a chemical fingerprint the authors say points to
On September 28, the European Space Agency's JUICE spacecraft swings within 8,640 kilometres of Earth over the Indian Ocean, borrowing 3.5 kilometres a second of speed from our planet for free. It's the third of four such thefts on a roundabout route to Jupiter's icy moons that won't actually arrive
Cat kidneys are stuffed with fat droplets, and nobody has known why for about 110 years. A study in Current Biology reports the answer: they are a reservoir for thirteen branched-chain fatty acids whose exact mix differs from cat to cat, holds steady within one animal, and survives on the ground for
CERN's ATLAS and CMS experiments have found strong evidence that pairs of Z bosons — the carriers of the weak nuclear force — come out of certain Higgs boson decays quantum entangled. It's the first time entanglement has been measured between two massive force-carrying particles rather than matter p
The James Webb Space Telescope's newest, largest public image is a panorama of a stellar nursery called IC 348 — and buried in it are the smallest brown dwarfs ever confirmed, weighing in at about twice the mass of Jupiter. That number is smaller than the theory of how stars form says it should be a
Malaria killed about 610,000 people in 2024, three quarters of them children under five. One approach to ending it does not spray anything, distribute anything, or ask anyone to take a pill — it edits the mosquito so the parasite cannot survive inside it, and lets the edit spread itself through the
Between July 2021 and April 2023 the Antarctic ice sheet got heavier by about 695 billion tons — the largest gain in the twenty-four-year satellite-gravity record. A paper in Nature traces it to a warm patch of tropical ocean that bent the atmosphere over East Antarctica and turned it into a snow fu
A team including Roger Penrose has dropped a rubidium atom that was, in the quantum sense, in two places at once — one half falling freely, the other held still — and read off how gravity changed it. Einstein's equivalence principle survived. What makes it worth an entry is not the result but the la
On 3 September the BepiColombo spacecraft, two hundred million kilometres from Earth, let go of the engine that carried it for eight years and 9.9 billion kilometres. On 21 November it has to stop at Mercury, the hardest planet in the solar system to arrive at, using a sequence it will run on its ow