Jan 5th, 2026 - Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. . W hen a young adult leaves home to work or study, there's a good chance they'll settle into life in a new locale. A Pew Research Center survey found only 18 percent of United States adults between the ages of 25 and 34 live in their parents' homes, despite the potential advantages of familiarity and lower costs. In contrast, for many species, females return to their homelands to reproduce. Such "natal philopatry" has been recorded in animals as diverse as sparrows and turtles. Now, a study published in Oecologia shows that elephant seals also ... [Read More]

Jan 5th, 2026 - Home » Quantum Computing Stats, Trends & Future 2026: Crucial Year for Quantum Security Quantum Computing Stats, Trends & Future 2026: Crucial Year for Quantum Security 1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) The encryption protecting billions of dollars, which experts once called unbreakable, no longer works. Hackers don't need passwords. They don't brute-force keys. They simply walk through digital vaults that were supposed to last for decades. This is the future quantum computing is pulling toward us quietly, steadily, and faster than most organizations realize. Quantum computers don't ... [Read More]

Jan 4th, 2026 - Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... The Trump administration closed NASA's largest research library Friday, a facility that houses tens of thousands of books, documents and journals — many of them not digitized or available anywhere else. Jacob Richmond, a NASA spokesperson, said the agency would review the library holdings over the next 60 days and some material would be stored in a government warehouse while the rest would be tossed away. "This process is an established method that is used by federal agencies to properly dispose of federally owned property," Richmond said. The ... [Read More]

Jan 4th, 2026 - The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine . All of modern mathematics is built on the foundation of set theory, the study of how to organize abstract collections of objects. But in general, research mathematicians don't need to think about it when they're solving their problems. They can take it for granted that sets behave the way they'd expect, and carry on with their work. Descriptive set theorists are an exception. This small community of mathematicians never stopped studying the fundamental nature of sets—particularly the strange infinite ones that other ... [Read More]

Jan 4th, 2026 - Planned to be the largest particle accelerator in the world, China's Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC) was meant to be about 100 kilometers or 62 miles long. That's much bigger than CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) with an approximately 27 kilometer circumference – or nearly 17 miles. These systems, especially the LHC, play a huge role Development for CEPC started in 2012, around the time CERN discovered the Higgs boson particle; however, it appears the multibillion-dollar project is now paused. It was not included in the country's next five-year plan, ... [Read More]

Jan 4th, 2026 - At a rock shelter known as HOR-1, near the base of Mount Hora, archaeologists have identified what they describe as the earliest confirmed adult cremation ever found. The remains belong to a woman who lived roughly 9,500 years ago and was intentionally burned on a carefully constructed pyre, then buried at the same location. According to the researchers, this is the oldest known in situ adult cremation anywhere in the world. Science Advances The woman, designated Hora 3, died sometime between the ages of 18 and 60. Only parts of her skeleton were recovered, including limb bones, vertebrae, ... [Read More]

Jan 3rd, 2026 - In The Uncanny X-Men, Magneto, supervillain and CEO of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, wants to destroy humanity – and in the first X-Men movie, aims at forcibly mutating all human beings so that normals no longer exist to discriminate against mutants. It turns out that Magneto really should have studied oncology, because if he had, he might have learned that magnetism could be an ultimate weapon against cancer. And then, instead of waging war on humanity, all nations would bow before him, the trillionaire controlling the medical establishment (that is, a different sort of ... [Read More]

Jan 3rd, 2026 - CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The  moon sun  share top billing in 2026. Kicking off the year's cosmic wonders is the moon, drawing  the first astronauts to visit in more than 50 years  , as well as a caravan of robotic lunar landers, including Jeff Bezos' new supersized Blue Moon. A supermoon looms on Jan. 3, and an astronomical blue moon is on the books for May. The sun will also generate buzz with a ring-of-fire eclipse at the bottom of the world in February and a total solar eclipse at the top of the world in August. Expect  more auroras  in unexpected ... [Read More]