NIH head, still angry about COVID, wants a second scientific revolution
At the end of January, Washington, DC, saw an extremely unusual event. The MAHA Institute, which was set up to advocate for some of the most profoundly unscientific ideas of…
February 2026
4 times drinking coffee was illegal—or even punishable by death
Bach wrote a cantata about it. Scholars, philosophers, and lawyers have argued over it. And every day, people swear they can’t live without it. No, not love or anything as…
No, North Carolina’s wild horses were not wrapped in insulation
We recently saw a Facebook post featuring a series of images of people on a cold beach bundling up horses with what looked like duct tape and insulation material. The…
How to clear space in your Google for free
If Google keeps bothering you to pay for cloud storage, it’s not just you. You only get a relatively measly 15GB of storage free of charge with a Google account,…
Under Trump, EPA’s enforcement of environmental laws collapses, report finds
Enforcement against polluters in the United States plunged in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, a far bigger drop than in the same period of his first…
Sixteen Claude AI agents working together created a new C compiler
Amid a push toward AI agents, with both Anthropic and OpenAI shipping multi-agent tools this week, Anthropic is more than ready to show off some of its more daring AI…
Malicious packages for dYdX cryptocurrency exchange empties user wallets
Open source packages published on the npm and PyPI repositories were laced with code that stole wallet credentials from dYdX developers and backend systems and, in some cases, backdoored devices,…
COVID-19 cleared the skies but also supercharged methane emissions
In the spring of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic brought global industry and travel nearly to a halt, satellite sensors recorded a dramatic plunge in nitrogen dioxide, a byproduct of…
Synthetic skin reveals hidden ‘Mona Lisa’ when exposed to heat
Octopuses and their cephalopod cousins have long fascinated biologists with their seemingly supernatural shapeshifting. The cephalopods rapidly change color and texture, blending into their surroundings and evading predators. This natural…
$13 thrift store camera hid 70-year-old undeveloped film
An offhand purchase at a secondhand shop has revealed itself to be an unexpected time capsule—and is steeped in its own mystery. Recently, a customer near Salisbury, England paid around…