Feb 6th, 2026 - A million years of kitchen accidents may have forced the human immune system to evolve. All major technological achievements of our civilization can be traced back to the most ancient of technologies: controlled fire. We tamed fire, cooked our food, then our brains grew, and we conquered the planet. But there is a hidden, painful chapter to this story that has been etched into our genome for over a million years. While every other animal on Earth flees from flame, humans invite it into their homes. This fiery love affair comes with a cost. For as long as we have been human, we have been ... [Read More]

Feb 6th, 2026 - Off the southern coast of Argentina, Patagonia is home to millions of yellow-eyed Magellanic penguins. Each day, adults  step out of their colonies , bobbing their plump white bellies, to forage for fish for their infants. Back in the colony, the chicks they abandoned become vulnerable to getting abducted by predators like foxes, skunks, or armadillos. Initially, most of these penguin families had moved here from nearby islands due to the absence of predators. But today, they are living with a persistent sense of threat from predators who have invaded the region. In the Journal of ... [Read More]

Feb 6th, 2026 - Over the past several years, there has been a steady drumbeat of warnings about the impact of quantum computing on traditional encryption methods, with consistent calls for organizations – both within the federal government and across the private sector – to begin the work of migrating to post-quantum cryptography (PQC). While this issue is highly complex and technical, at a high level--quantum computers, which use "qubits" that perform mathematical algorithms "exponentially faster than a classical computer," [1] will soon be capable of breaking traditional encryption methods ... [Read More]

Feb 5th, 2026 - Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. . I f you've ever had the misfortune of staring down the gullet of a screaming goose, you know it contains the stuff of nightmares—a thick, barbed tongue surrounded by an array of fleshy, toothlike protrusions. Now, research published in The Innovation about a recently uncovered Archaeopteryx fossil shows that birds got their fascinating structures early in their evolution.  Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. The Archaeopteryx fossil in question arrived at the Chicago Field Museum in 2022, and chief preparator Akiko Shinya ... [Read More]

Feb 5th, 2026 - Reading time 2 minutes A large rocky asteroid will make a close approach to Earth in 2032, with the tantalizing prospect of smashing directly into the Moon. If it does, the lunar impact is likely to produce a bright flash visible from Earth, generate meteor showers in Earth's atmosphere, and create a long-lasting infrared glow, according to a new study. Astronomers deemed asteroid 2024 YR4 as potentially hazardous when it was first spotted two years ago, with the odds of it striking Earth reaching nearly 3% . Thankfully, those odds have since dwindled down to practically nothing , but ... [Read More]

Feb 5th, 2026 - The jeep that takes us to Umm al-Khair rocks from side to side, as if we were on a boat in open water. At the wheel is Ali Awad, a Palestinian journalist from the nearby village of Tuba. Almost every formal route connecting Tuba to Umm al-Khair has been destroyed by the Zionist state; what remains is a single dirt road, crudely carved through the hills of the southern West Bank's semi-desert of Masafer Yatta by the local residents themselves. Few vehicles can make the journey: tractors during the planting season or when feed must be hauled in for livestock; military vehicles, which patrol ... [Read More]

Feb 5th, 2026 - The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency seeks circuit-level innovations to reduce reliance on electronics that erase photonics' speed advantages. Photonic chips promise massive speed and efficiency advantages over electronics, but those benefits evaporate in real-world systems because today's photonic circuits are too limited in scale and complexity. That forces constant conversion back to electronics that adds milliseconds of delay to systems measured in nanoseconds. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's new PICASSO program aims to break through that bottleneck by developing ... [Read More]

Feb 5th, 2026 - New study reveals our closest relatives share the cognitive roots of imagination and pretense. Remember childhood tea parties? The cups are empty, the teapot is dry, yet the air is thick with the drama of imagined pouring, sipping, and spilling. The mental gymnastics required to participate in such a scenario — namely, the ability to hold a "secondary representation" of the world that differs from reality — used to be a pretty clear boundary line separating humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. That boundary has just been blurred. In a new study published today in Science , ... [Read More]