Astronomers Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish discovered pulsar stars using a radio telescope constructed near Cambridge, UK.Credit: Hencoup Enterprises/Science Photo Library The Engine of Scientific Discovery: How New Methods and Tools Spark Major Breakthroughs Alexander Krauss Oxford Univ. Press (2026) Popular accounts of notable scientific breakthroughs (including artificial intelligence) often portray them as the
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Global warming isn’t just about heat during the day. Nights are also getting hotter1–3. In May, Delhi recorded an overnight minimum temperature of 32.4 °C, and other parts of India remained 3–5 °C above normal after dark. As Western Europe experienced its hottest June on record, France registered a record overnight low of 22 °C, and East Saxony,
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Fossilized microbial mats known as stromalites provide important records of some of Earth’s earliest life.Credit: Jon G. Fuller/VW Pics/UIG via Getty Earth & Life: A Four Billion Year Conversation Andrew H. Knoll Princeton Univ. Press (2026) On 14 February 1990, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft turned around briefly to snap a picture of Earth before heading
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In 2019, after quitting a faculty job in response to bullying, I co-founded the Academic Parity Movement with environmental activist Saya Ameli Hajebi. We built the organization to give researchers somewhere to turn when their own institutions did not listen to or, worse, betrayed them. Seven years and several thousand case reports later, I have
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Explanation: This total solar eclipse appeared not only poetically beautiful but scientifically interesting. Usually the solar corona appears white, and to some observers the corona of last week’s total solar eclipse did appear this pearly color. But this time, totality observers in Spain saw a corona that appeared unusually golden. For one reason, from Spain, the totality occurred when
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