Science

Biology, space, physics, energy and the natural world, from the evidence.

Science

A Subduction Zone Caught in the Act of Dying

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

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Biology

Two Sea Spiders Nobody Had Named in Nearly a Hundred Years

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

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Space

A Comet Carrying Someone Else's Recipe for Water

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

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Space

The Cheapest Fuel in the Solar System Is a Planet

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

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Biology

The Calling Card in a Cat's Kidneys

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

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Science

4.7 Sigma, and a New Kind of Spooky

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

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Space

Twice the Mass of Jupiter, and a Problem for How Stars Form

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

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Biology

The Mosquito That Can't Carry It

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

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Science

Galileo's Experiment, Done With One Atom in Two Places

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

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Space

Eight Years to Mercury, and One Chance to Stop

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

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