Jan 12th, 2026 - Scientists analyzed carbonate deposits from baths, aqueduct to learn more about city's changing water supply. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE released thermal energy roughly equivalent to 100,000 times the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, spewing molten rock, pumice, and hot ash over Pompeii. Pompeii's public baths, aqueduct, and water towers were among the preserved structures frozen in time. A new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed calcium carbonate deposits from those structures to learn more ... [Read More]

Jan 12th, 2026 - Plans for a reservoir in the Oxfordshire countryside would be "absolutely devastating" for a business located on the land, its owner has said. A consultation on Thames Water's South East Strategic Reservoir Option, near Abingdon, to supply 15 million people in the south east of England is due to end this week. Hal Colliver said it would be "impossible" to relocate his air maintenance and training company, which is located within the area earmarked for the reservoir. Thames Water has insisted the project, costing £7.5bn, is a "vital piece of national water infrastructure". According ... [Read More]

Jan 9th, 2026 - Swimming at a crawl with cloudy eyes and mottled skin, the Greenland shark looks like it's seen better days. The shark's eyes were thought to be barely functional, as it spends most of its time in pitch black waters up to 3,000 metres deep.  And its unearthly look is often accentuated by the presence of tiny crustacean parasites hooked into the corneas of its eyes. But the Greenland shark ( in the chilly North Atlantic and Arctic waters, making it one of the longest-living vertebrates on Earth. And according to new research, published in Nature Communications, its seemingly undead eyes ... [Read More]

Jan 9th, 2026 - Reading time 3 minutes Since its launch in 1990, Hubble has transformed our understanding of the cosmos. The space telescope revealed a universe teeming with galaxies, stars, and planets instead of what we once saw as empty patches of the skies. Today, the telescope's aging hardware is being dragged down toward Earth, and Hubble may be nearing its end sooner than anticipated. A team of scientists has estimated that the Hubble Space Telescope could reenter Earth's atmosphere and meet its fiery demise in 2033. That said, there's also a 1 in 10 chance that the iconic observatory could come to ... [Read More]

Jan 9th, 2026 - Calculations show that injecting randomness into a quantum neural network could help it determine properties of quantum objects that are otherwise fundamentally hard to access The Heisenberg uncertainty principle puts a limit on how precisely we can measure certain properties of quantum objects. But researchers may have found a way to bypass this limitation using a quantum version of a neural network. Given, for example, a chemically useful molecule, how can you predict what properties it might have in an hour or tomorrow? To make such predictions, researchers start by measuring its current ... [Read More]

Jan 9th, 2026 - This article (originally published Aug. 13, 2025) has been updated to include new text and illustrations featured in the Jan. 2026 issue of . Using an artificial intelligence algorithm, astronomers have discovered a new type of supernova that likely results from the merging of a dying star and its black hole companion. In July 2023, the Zwicky Transient Facility detected supernova SN 2023zkd, located 730 million light-years from Earth. Six months later, in January 2024, an AI algorithm known as the Lightcurve Anomaly Identification and Similarity Search (LAISS) flagged the explosion as ... [Read More]

Jan 9th, 2026 - Supermassive black holes are notorious for gobbling up young stars and burping out powerful jets of gas as they finish the snack. Scientists call this mechanism "jet precession." Typically, only two types of jet streams are observed by the astronomers during this process. One is the radiative mode where a white-hot incandescent accretion disk heats up the gassy material, and the superheated gas pushes out the cooler gas outwards. Another mode, as Scientific American describes, sees firehose-like jets of gassy particles trundling from the black hole's edges and shooting outwards, creating ... [Read More]

Jan 9th, 2026 - Natu re reinforces the idea that Homo sapiens originated in Africa. This is based on a set of fossils unearthed in a Moroccan cave that date to 773,000 years ago, just around the time when our evolutionary family tree split into what would become Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans. The cave itself, known as Grotte à Hominidés, is located in Casablanca. It looks like it was more of a hangout for predators than a place where early Homo sapiens ever lived. Originally excavated in 1969, it's been an on-again, off-again hub of archaeological digging. CNN reports, Scientists ... [Read More]