3 driving myths too many people believe
The average American spends nearly an hour a day behind the wheel, according to the US Department of Transportation. Some people love driving. Others tolerate it in order to get…
May 2026
They call it stupid hot for a reason: Heat muddles animal brains
On a blazing hot day in South Africa, female southern pied babblers can’t think straight. The medium-sized black-and-white birds are trying to get at tasty mealworms behind a see-through barrier.…
How to go back in time with Google Maps
Google Maps has been helping us get from A to B since 2005. In that time, it’s amassed a huge amount of data about the world—from business opening times to…
This creepy blob robot will keep going even if you break its legs
It seems like every week there’s another example of a new robot modeled after a real creature in the animal kingdom. From dogs and bats, to roaches and desert lizards,…
Grifters, cynics, and true believers: The family tree of vaccine opponents
Stanley Plotkin, 93, was instrumental in developing a number of vaccines over the course of his career. He recently said that he’s “beginning to regret having lived so long—because we’re…
Proposed new US funding rules: We can cancel any grant at any time
Last August, the Trump administration issued an executive order intended to fundamentally alter how grant funding is handled by the US government. Under the system that had made the US…
Botnet of more than 17 million devices dismantled
Authorities in the Netherlands said they dismantled a botnet that comprised more than 17 million devices and were managed by 200 servers in a joint operation by the police and…
Breathing on this chip reveals a secret message
A team of engineers at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) have developed a humidity-based image encoder that looks straight out of James Bond’s Q-Lab. The postage stamp-sized chip…
Severed sea cucumber appendages don’t seem to die
Organs, arms, appendages, and other complex tissues usually decay rapidly when they’re separated from their host. Over the years, biologists have seen some success with keeping them alive outside of…
Fed up with vibe coders, dev sneaks data-nuking prompt injection into their code
The controversy over vibe coding reached a new high this week after a developer added hidden instructions to his open source Java testing app to sabotage projects performed by AI…