Explore the latest scientific discoveries, science news, breakthroughs and developments from around the world.
The construction of new data centers is shaping up to be a defining issue in the 2026 midterm elections. Politicians in both parties have been distancing themselves from data centers in the face of public discontent around the issue, with public backlash leading to the freezing of dozens of data center projects nationwide this year.
Two major alien-life announcements in 2025 generated enormous excitement, but most astrobiologists remained unconvinced. Only 6.6% of surveyed experts thought possible biological molecules on K2-18b probably represented extraterrestrial life, while 15.1% said the same about intriguing mineral patterns in a Martian rock.
Tracking rent prices may help businesses and policymakers understand where inflation is headed months in advance of government inflation reports, according to researchers at Penn State's Smeal College of Business who developed the Penn State/ACY Alternative Inflation Index. The Penn State index was recently incorporated into the Bloomberg Terminal, a software system that serves financial professionals with real-time market data, news and analytics.
Up and down the Pacific coast, dead gray whales are mysteriously washing ashore—and scientists think they know why
Hurricane Lowell lashed Hawaii with damaging winds, heavy rainfall and powerful floods, knocking out power for 91% of a western island as it pushed farther into the Pacific on Tuesday.
OpenAI said Tuesday that one of its unreleased artificial intelligence models had solved a mathematical puzzle that has eluded mathematicians for generations, a claim that also drew a fight with rival researchers over credit.
There’s more to fog than meets the eye
The patient: A 55-year-old man in BangladeshThe symptoms: The man went to the emergency room with severe abdominal pain that he said began five hours prior to his visit. What happened next: During a physical examination, doctors noted that the patient's temperature and blood pressure were normal. His heartbeat was slightly elevated, at 110 beats per minute (bpm). (A typical resting heart rate for adults is 60 to 100 bpm.)The man explained that one day earlier, an eel had "entered through his rectum accidentally," his doctors wrote in a report of the case. At the time of the encounter, the man was wearing a lungi — a type of long skirt often worn by Bangladeshi men — and he explained that the...
Assistant professor of psychology Jessica Ayers’s new research challenges assumptions about the kind of friendships we need
Dozens of temporary gas turbines are powering SpaceXAI’s expansion—and fights over permits and pollution
In this excerpt from "The Carbon Wave" (MIT Press, 2026), author Leah Stokes, an associate professor of environmental politics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, looks at a hopeful moment in U.S. politics when climate change took center stage: when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey ramped up calls for a "Green New Deal." In September 2017, a still-unknown Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez watched as Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico. Electricity went down for months. Like thousands of Puerto Ricans, her grandfather died in the storm's aftermath. She could see how climate change was hitting her community harder than others.And it wasn't just Ocasio-Cortez's communit...
Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS contains exceptionally high levels of methanol, suggesting it formed under conditions very different from those that shaped most comets in our solar system. ALMA also revealed that tiny icy grains around the comet are releasing methanol like miniature comets, giving astronomers an unusually detailed look at an object from another star system.