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• Almost 20 years after his death, Elliott Smith, born on August 6, 1969, has just received a very unusual tribute: a minor planet discovered in 2014 will officially bear his name in the solar system
• What looks like a beautiful dance in the Kushiro wetlands could be a secret conversation between two cranes, featuring a series of bows, poses, and movements that last up to three minutes and respond to each other’s gestures
• A man with severe paralysis caused by ALS used a brain implant at home for more than 3,800 hours and was able to convert his attempts to speak into text, computer-generated information, and a voice similar to his own
• A frightened bat ray could warn the others without making a sound or splashing, by releasing a chemical signal into the water that its neighbors detect within seconds
• A community that was driven from its forest lands in the 1970s now protects 71,700 acres in the Congo and has managed to reduce deforestation by 87% in just one year
• The famous Himalayan viper, first described in 1864, has just lost its unique identity, as scientists have discovered that five species were previously grouped under that name
• Ancient teeth preserved in museums may harbor a vast microbial archive, and a new preliminary article suggests that dental plaque reveals how diet has influenced the oral bacteria of mammals
• A Montana county commissioner wanted to prepare his county in case coal revenues dried up, and voters ousted him from office in a Republican primary that served as a warning to other mining communities
• The plague may have claimed the lives of children in hunter-gatherer communities in Siberia 5,500 years ago, long before medieval cities, flea-infested rats, and the dreaded Black Death existed
• The fight against climate change is entering a challenging phase: it is no longer enough to simply reduce pollution, and scientists are talking about removing up to 9,700 million metric tons of CO2 per year by 2050
• Homo erectus teeth dating back about 400,000 years, found in China, have just revealed an unexpected clue about a possible family connection to the mysterious Denisovans
• Could an AI model read a whole stack of documents in one go without slowing to a crawl? That is the claim now drawing attention around SubQ, a new large language model from the Miami startup Subquadratic
• Researchers have just observed a jumping gene doing something extremely unusual: jumping from a tiny predatory bacterium to the dead cells of another species, like a thief sneaking into an empty house
• Menstruation has been a part of astronauts’ space travel for decades, but in 2027 it could, for the first time, become the focus of a specific experiment conducted in microgravity conditions
• The country with the largest forest area in South America may face a momentous decision: to accept large-scale soybean farming and cattle ranching projects or to protect the rivers, communities, and forests that took centuries to form
• SETI tracked the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS for more than 7 hours and analyzed nearly 74 million radio signals; the results point to something less spectacular, but just as fascinating: a natural comet
• The green economy has just surpassed $10 trillion and would already be the world’s third-largest industry if it were counted as a separate sector
• The Moon will no longer be just the place where humans left their footprints in 1969; now, NASA and China want to build bases, landing strips, control towers, and shelters there, but a fundamental regulation is still missing
• The United States has 624,167 bridges, of which more than 220,000 are in need of repair, but a new generation of quantum sensors could detect hidden damage before it becomes visible from the road
• On May 30, a loud boom shook Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and NASA traced it to a meteor that broke apart with the force of 300 tons of TNT
• The inexpensive white fish that many people keep in their freezers has just shown signs of recovery: Vietnam’s exports to the U.S. increased by 4% between January and April 2026
• The June Bootids meteor shower may seem very faint almost every year, but throughout its history, extremely rare bursts of up to 100 meteors per hour have been recorded, causing many people to look up at the sky
• A Russian university has just unveiled a tractor attachment that injects cooled exhaust gases directly into the soil—a highly unusual idea that promises to benefit crops but requires extensive testing under real-world conditions
• A 6-year-old boy was looking for rocks for a school arts-and-crafts project in Norway when he stumbled upon an iron sword that had been buried for about 1,200 years
• NASA is teaming up with Relativity Space, a newbie in the space exploration field, and not Space X, for a project mapping the violent seasons on Mars due to take off in 2028
• The U.S. power grid has just been given a 60-day ultimatum, as artificial intelligence data centers consume so much energy that they are already raising concerns about the impact on household electricity bills
• A mixed bag for soybean farmers growing the crop in our future climate: higher yields but with poorer nutritional profiles
• NASA is preparing an extremely unusual rescue mission to save the Swift telescope, an observatory launched in 2004 that has been recording cosmic explosions and was never meant to be recovered
• It looks like a yellow toy floating in a lagoon, but it has a huge mission: to find the most resilient corals before the ocean warms up again
• It all began with a strange echo around 14 giant black holes; scientists now believe it could indicate massive concentrations of dark matter, the mysterious component that makes up 27% of the universe
• It all began with an extremely salty current flowing every day from the Mediterranean; now, a ship is traversing the ocean to investigate the Atlantic’s great climate engine 
• A camera captured Mary, a two-year-old Tasmanian devil, roaming the park at 4 a.m. She had escaped with an “unusually large” leap and survived for 15 days amid residential neighborhoods, thickets, cars, and real dangers
• Our galaxy isn’t stationary but hurtling at full speed toward a hidden gravitational anomaly located between 150 and 250 million light-years away
• MIT’s new method promises to speed up the search for alloys for rockets, chips, and clean energy by analyzing invisible “neighborhoods” between atoms
• It all began with dozens of small earthquakes that no one detected; now, a 64-page study suggests that they may have been a precursor to the massive 8.8-magnitude earthquake that struck nine days earlier
• Everything seemed to point to a simple “malfunction” in the brain until a decade of research began to reveal a different reality: tinnitus could be a side effect of a mechanism that tries to keep hearing alive
• The enormous mass of warm water in the Pacific that has just “woken up” and could influence storms, wildfires, monsoons, and temperatures through 2027
• Science discovers the “point of no return” for mosquitoes: the mathematical trick that could forever change the fight against malaria
• They hid the number zero from an artificial intelligence system in the hope that it would discover it on its own; what happened teaches us an important lesson about the future of AI
• Scientists at MIT have created a robot with an “elephant’s memory” that promises to tell you where you left your keys last night—and it does so in a matter of seconds
• NASA is developing and testing an artificial intelligence system that identifies 93% of the signs of a flash flood and could provide crucial time to respond
• A NASA astronaut filmed the southern lights swirling like neon paint, turning orbital night into a free light show
• A few cookie crumbs on a trail may seem insignificant, but a new study conducted in Panama suggests that they can distract ants from a task that is key to a plant’s expansion
• Cockroaches already seemed indestructible, but a new genomic study has just revealed something even stranger: they harbor thousands of fragments of bacterial DNA hidden within their own genome
• An animal about the size of a small house cat has just caused quite a stir in Mexico after becoming the first known photographic evidence of the mysterious Cozumel dwarf fox
• The Giants’ Causeway was not formed as a result of a battle between giants, but rather by an explosive volcanic event that took place 60 million years ago—an event that, as scientists have now determined, occurred over a shorter period of time
• Georgia has just created a $2 million fund to save farms before these centuries-old fields are turned into housing developments, warehouses, and data centers
• Puerto Rico had a $1 billion federal fund to install solar panels and batteries in vulnerable households, but now much of that money is being diverted to the old power grid
• Everything pointed to another cut, but Grand Staircase-Escalante has just narrowly avoided, at the last minute, a decision that would have forever changed one of the most impressive natural monuments in the United States
• NASA photos reveal San Carlos Reservoir shrinking to a mud-ring, visual proof that drought plus demand equals trouble
• Sponge-city tech is teaching concrete to drink stormwater like a thirsty park — and it can’t happen fast enough
• Coral reefs seemed doomed by marine heatwaves, but a new global map has just identified 64,200 square miles that may still have a real chance
• Greenland’s ancient frozen landfills contained microbial traces dating back 4,500 years that provided insights into hunting, agriculture, hygiene, and daily life; now, the melting ice is exposing these remains
• Switzerland has excavated a “second country” beneath the Alps: more than 1,400 tunnels and about 1,243 miles beneath the rock to change the climate… without almost anyone noticing when traveling
• SpaceX’s valuation keeps rocketing, raising eyebrows about how high a private company can fly before gravity bites
• Switzerland just scanned what’s under everyone’s feet, turning secret geology into a national GPS for planners
• A chip material only three atoms thick was hit with plasma, and a tiny chemical trick changed what happened next
• It all started with a simple bowl of oatmeal and an apple; now scientists believe that these foods contain more than 139,000 compounds that could change the way we understand nutrition
• It all began with a material thousands of times thinner than a human hair; now scientists believe they have found an unexpected way to manufacture much more efficient superconductors