NASA Is Sending a Mission to Find Out What’s Inside This Moon Hole The Marius Hills Pit, roughly 34 meters deep, may be the entrance to a massive underground lava tube. Table of Contents A hole nobody has looked inside…
Scientists Just Doubled the Genetic Alphabet Every Living Thing Uses Every living thing on Earth writes its genetic code with 4 letters. Scientists just proved a natural enzyme can read 8. Table of Contents Four letters, forever, or not What…
MIT Turned Living Bacteria Into Working Transistors MIT researchers printed engineered bacterial colonies to behave like electronic transistors. Table of Contents Bacteria that compute How a living transistor works Building a circuit out of 24 colonies The catch: eight hours…
Scientists Turn Plastic Bottles Into Cookies That Could Feed Astronauts Engineered yeast can now convert PET plastic waste into edible protein. Table of Contents The bottle that became a snack Step 1: Dissolving plastic into syrup Step 2: Yeast that…
A forest doesn’t just disappear. It gets buried, burned, or drowned, and it leaves a scar. So when scientists found more than 30 dead pine trees standing on a treeless, windswept plateau above Yellowstone, with no scar, no explanation, and…
For decades, the story of the high Pyrenees was written by people who never actually lived there: ecologists, hikers, park rangers, all treating the peaks above 2,000 meters as empty wilderness humans merely passed through on their way to somewhere…
The rock shelter on the Umm Arak Plateau in Egypt’s South Sinai Desert, holding roughly 10,000 years of continuous human art. Some walls get repainted every decade. This one got repainted for ten thousand years straight. In Egypt’s South Sinai…
For most of the last century, archaeologists told a fairly tidy story about how humans stopped wandering: farming came first, and settling down followed as a consequence of needing to tend crops. A site tucked into the limestone foothills of…
In 2001, a fossil fragment went missing from a research collection in southern Brazil. Not dramatically stolen, not destroyed, just misplaced somewhere in the ordinary chaos of a university archive. For twenty-one years, that missing piece meant an entire ancient…
Sponges have a reputation for being the couch potatoes of the ocean: rooted in place, filtering seawater for scraps, doing absolutely nothing that could be described as threatening. Then scientists dropped a robotic submersible more than 3,600 meters into one…