Science

In northern Vermont, where I live, old newspaper clippings show pictures of people driving trucks across Lake Champlain. Those icy, ephemeral corridors, though, seem like relics of a bygone era. Roughly half a century ago, maybe more, the region started …

We’ve all instinctively clung to another person when frightened, if only as a child clutching our mother’s hand. But if that person is scared, too, this behavior may not have the desired calming effect. And a new study, published in …

Planets drifting unmoored through interstellar space, with no star to call home, may still have moons that are warm enough to support life, a new study has found. Through a combination of a thick hydrogen atmosphere and internal heating generated …

The advent of farming led to new evolutionary pressures on humans CHRISTIAN JEGOU/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY A study combining the growing number of ancient genomes from living people has given us our best picture yet of how humans have evolved over …

A new pair of molecular tools is allowing scientists to uncover how plants and fungi coordinate their ancient underground partnership. For about 450 million years, plants and soil fungi have maintained a mutually beneficial partnership. The fungi grow through plant …

For many years, nuclear physicists believed that “Islands of Inversion” were found mainly in isotopes packed with extra neutrons. These unusual regions of the nuclear chart are places where the normal structure of atomic nuclei suddenly stops following the expected …

On February 5 Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6, its most powerful artificial intelligence model. Among the model’s new features is the ability to coordinate teams of autonomous agents — multiple AIs that divide up the work and complete it in …

Newly released Mars images offer a detailed look at one of the Red Planet’s oldest, most heavily cratered regions, highlighting a landscape shaped by billions of years of impacts, volcanism and erosion. The European Space Agency (ESA) shared images of …

You probably can’t explain how you ride a bike. Not properly, anyway. You could tell a beginner where to sit, when to push off, roughly how the gears work. But the subtle business of how hard to pedal to stay …

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Primates of all stripes really love their crystals. Archeologists have found the shiny rocks at dig sites dating back as long as 780,000 years …