Astronomers are filling in the blanks of the Kuiper Belt
Out beyond the orbit of Neptune lies an expansive ring of ancient relics, dynamical enigmas, and possibly a hidden planet—or two. The Kuiper Belt, a region of frozen debris about…
Tech
Metal detectorist finds 19th century Japanese coin in Australia
A metal detector hobbyist discovered a centuries’ old coin while scouring an abandoned sports field—and the coin is especially rare for the area. In the southern Australian province of Victoria,…
Downhill skiing’s biggest hurdle? Friction.
Every ski and snowboarding event at the 2026 Winter Olympics is won through a combination of sheer athleticism, quick thinking, creativity, and persistence. But like so many other sports, competitors…
Tiny, 45 base long RNA can make copies of itself
There are plenty of unanswered questions about the origin of life on Earth. But the research community has largely reached consensus that one of the key steps was the emergence…
Teen brothers build a Disney-inspired ride in family basement
When 12-year-old Matteo Mucchetti mapped out an amusement-style attraction that he wanted to create in his family’s basement and then showed it to his older brother Nico, the high-school sophomore…
When Amazon badly needed a ride, Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket delivered
The heavy version of Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket launched for the first time Thursday, hauling 32 spacecraft to low-Earth orbit for Amazon’s satellite broadband constellation. The Ariane 6 rocket lifted…
OpenAI sidesteps Nvidia with unusually fast coding model on plate-sized chips
On Thursday, OpenAI released its first production AI model to run on non-Nvidia hardware, deploying the new GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark coding model on chips from Cerebras. The model delivers code at more…
Attackers prompted Gemini over 100,000 times while trying to clone it, Google says
On Thursday, Google announced that “commercially motivated” actors have attempted to clone knowledge from its Gemini AI chatbot by simply prompting it. One adversarial session reportedly prompted the model more…
Bringing the “functionally extinct” American chestnut back from the dead
Very few people alive today have seen the Appalachian forests as they existed a century ago. Even as state and national parks preserved ever more of the ecosystem, fungal pathogens…
Unique structure of elephant whiskers give them built-in sensing “intelligence”
An elephant’s trunk is a marvelous thing, flexible enough to bend and stretch as it forages for food, but also stiff enough to grasp and maneuver even delicate objects like…