Feb 6th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google If you want to study a beaked whale, good luck doing it the normal way. These animals are basically professionals at staying out of sight. They spend most of their lives at extreme depths, come up for air briefly, and then vanish again.  Instead of trying to spot them, scientists in the Gulf of Mexico did something much smarter: they listened. A team of researchers used underwater recordings to rebuild a 3D picture of how beaked whales dive and hunt – without laying eyes on a single animal.  This is the first detailed description of deep-diving, ... [Read More]

Feb 6th, 2026 - Spotted lanternflies are thriving in the US, and scientists may know the reason. They speculate that the secret to spotted lanternflies' sustenance may lie in the tricks they picked up in their native country, as published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B . These creatures were first documented in the US back in 2014. Since then, they have expanded to 19 states in the eastern US. The spotted lanternfly (Lycorma delicatula) is a planthopper with long mouthparts that help it to suck sap from plants. The creature is native to China, and over the years, has spread to South ... [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]