The sun beat down on the supercontinent of Gondwana 237 million years ago, baking the red earth of what would one day be southern Brazil. In this sweltering Triassic world, dominated by hulking, pig-like dicynodonts and fearsome, crocodile-line predators, a small, unassuming creature scurried throug ...
The physics world recently witnessed a moment that will be etched into textbooks for decades to come. In the cavernous, complex halls of CERN’s Antimatter Factory, a collaboration of physicists known as AEgIS achieved the "impossible": they used a laser to cool down positronium—an exotic, fleeting a ...
Deep in the heart of the Amazon, a new species has emerged from the shadows. It bears the mark of a villain, the teeth of a human, and the name of a legend. Meet Myloplus sauron—the fish that has the scientific community and pop culture fans obsessed. When scientists peered into the murky, bi ...
The sun beats down on the limestone plateau of Abusir, roughly 4,500 years ago. Inside a cool, mud-brick administrative office, a man sits in silence. He is a scribe of the Old Kingdom, a member of the elite, a keeper of the Pharaoh’s secrets. To the outside world, he is a figure of envy—exempt from ...
Introduction: The God Editor For billions of years, the code of life was written in permanent ink. The four letters of DNA—A, C, G, and T—were transcribed by the slow, stochastic hand of evolution. Mutations occurred by chance, and natural selection decided which typos would remain and whic ...
In the grand theatre of Earth’s history, humanity usually plays the role of the antagonist—burning, polluting, and extracting until the systems that sustain us begin to crack. But there is one chapter in this story where we flipped the script. It is a tale of invisible poisons, scientific detective ...
On May 24, 2013, a violent shudder ripped through the Earth's interior beneath the icy waters of the Sea of Okhotsk, off the coast of Russia. It was a monster event—a magnitude 8.3 earthquake, releasing energy equivalent to 35 megatons of TNT. But unlike the devastating surface quakes that topple ci ...
Deep beneath the North American continent, where the bedrock seems solid and immutable, a quiet revolution is taking place. It is not a revolution of politics or culture, but of geology. Two massive scars in the Earth’s crust—one an ancient, healed wound and the other a still-festering tear—are forc ...
In the realm of materials science, oxygen is often the invisible shackle. For centuries, human engineering has relied on oxides—clays, silicas, and rusting metals—because oxygen is the most abundant element in the Earth's crust. It bonds aggressively, stabilizing materials into familiar, brittle for ...
In the quiet, dust-free sanctuaries of modern physics laboratories, a revolution is brewing that promises to render the invisible visible. For decades, our ability to measure the world has been fundamentally constrained by the laws of classical physics. We have been like astronomers trying to study ...