On July 9, 2026, a team of engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) sent a command to a spacecraft that has been flying since 1977. The message took about 19 hours to arrive, and another 19 for confirmation to come back that it had worked. There was no room for a dry run first: … Read more
In two days, weather permitting, half of Spain is going to stand around staring at the sky like slack-jawed tourists. On August 12, a total solar eclipse will sweep across the Iberian Peninsula from west to east, and this isn’t just any eclipse: it’s the first total eclipse visible from mainland Spain since 1912. Your … Read more
Imagine losing track of the largest predator that ever lived for 35 years… because someone put it back on the wrong museum shelf. That is, quite literally, what happened in Denmark with a set of giant vertebrae from Otodus megalodon, the colossal shark that ruled the oceans more than ten million years ago — and … Read more
Somewhere in the forests of Yunnan, China, and northern Laos, there’s now an officially rubbery beetle. Not literally, of course — it’s built from the same chitin as every other insect on the planet. But its jaws, antennae and mouthparts are so absurdly long and slender compared to its relatives that a team of entomologists … Read more
Picture a galaxy made of nothing but what you can actually see: stars, gas, and that’s it. No invisible scaffolding holding it together, even though everything we know about the universe says it should have one. It sounds like a cosmic glitch, almost like a plot hole in a sci-fi script, but a team of … Read more
You, me, and pretty much everyone you know are carrying around a small genetic mystery: fragments of DNA that come from neither our Homo sapiens ancestors, nor Neanderthals, nor Denisovans. They belong to two human lineages science didn’t even know existed — so ancient and so well hidden in our genome that nobody had managed … Read more
