Meet the college student crafting electric guitars from scratch
College sophomore Ian Vanveen, 20, got into woodworking as a way of budget management. “I didn’t have a whole lot of money,” he says, “so I decided to build what…
May 2026
Australian Aboriginals cared for a dingo’s grave for decades
A thousand years ago, the ancestors of today’s Barkindji people carefully buried a dingo (or garli, in the Barkindji language) in a mound of shells. Archaeologists recently studied the burial…
Pompeii victim ID’d as a likely doctor
Archaeologists used a combination of advanced CT scans and 3D digital reconstruction to identify one of the Pompeii victims who died in 79 CE during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius…
A revolutionary cancer treatment could transform autoimmune disease
At age 49, Jan Janisch-Hanzlik’s multiple sclerosis was destroying her freedom to live the life she wanted. She gave up her active nursing job for a desk role. Frequent falls…
If you use Google accounts, it’s time to do a free security checkup
Your Google account likely stores a lot of important information, from your home address in Google Maps and your work emails in Gmail, to family pictures in Google Photos and…
Watch adorable animals compete for best chewer in 2026 Crunch-a-Thon
Social media is widely considered to be bad for one’s mental health, at least anecdotally. However, it can have some positive impacts, such as videos of animals chewing food very…
Solar power production undercut by coal pollution
Coal is by far the most polluting fuel that we use. It produces the most carbon emissions per unit of energy, and impurities in the coal produce a lot of…
Why airplane toilets are tiny engineering marvels
There’s nothing quite like the sound of an airplane toilet flushing. But that incredibly loud sucking sound is actually something of an engineering marvel. These toilets flush, with no water,…
Three’s a party: US, China, and now Russia are on the prowl in GEO
The world’s leading space powers desperately want to know what the others are up to high above the equator. For more than a decade, the US military has operated a…
Send the arXiv AI-generated slop, get a yearlong vacation from submissions
AI-generated slop has shown up everywhere, including in the peer-reviewed literature. Fake citations, unedited prompt responses, and nonsensical diagrams have all slipped past editors and peer reviewers, and it’s not…