Science & Tech

Science & Tech

Science and technology that touch the real world, the atom, the genome, new materials, space and the machines remaking how we live. The breakthroughs that matter, with the human story and the honest catch.

A microscope view of muscle stem cells and muscle fibres glowing in fluorescent blue and green

Science & Tech

Scientists made aged muscle stem cells young again, and found the reason we slow down may protect us

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

Four astronauts in white spacesuits walking together toward a rocket at dawn ahead of the Artemis III mission

Science & Tech

NASA just named the Artemis III crew, and quietly confirmed they will not land on the Moon

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

A radiologist examining brain MRI scans on a screen showing the small deep lesions of a lacunar stroke

Science & Tech

For decades doctors blamed plaque for a lacunar stroke, and a 2026 study says the real cause is different

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

A supermarket shelf lined with packaged and processed foods that commonly contain food preservatives

Science & Tech

A huge new study ties the preservatives in everyday food to higher blood pressure and heart disease

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

A health worker giving a malaria vaccine to a young child at a clinic in Africa

Science & Tech

After a century of failure, a malaria vaccine is now measurably saving children's lives in Africa

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

The golden chandelier-like cooling apparatus of a quantum computer hanging in a lab

Science & Tech

After decades of hype, quantum computing is finally closing in on beating ordinary computers at something real

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

A coin-sized brain-computer interface implant with fine thread electrodes

Science & Tech

People are moving cursors and robotic arms with their thoughts, and in 2026 it stopped being a stunt

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

A glowing DNA double helix with one segment being edited, illustrating in vivo gene editing

Science & Tech

For the first time, a single infusion edited a genetic disease away inside patients' own bodies

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

A row of humanoid robots on a modern factory assembly line being built

Science & Tech

2026 is the year humanoid robots stopped being demos and started rolling off a real assembly line, one an hour

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

Illustration of a large long-necked titanosaur dinosaur walking through a green Late Cretaceous forest

Science & Tech

A fossil sat forgotten in a drawer for 41 years, and turned out to be the first dinosaur bone ever collected in Antarctica

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

Close-up of a Heliconius tropical butterfly with orange and yellow markings resting on a green leaf

Science & Tech

A tropical butterfly that barely ages could hold clues to a longer, healthier old age

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

Rows of small amber 1930s medicine bottles on a dim pharmacy shelf, evoking the poisoned Elixir Sulfanilamide of 1937

Science & Tech

A medicine that tasted of raspberries was mixed with a poison and sold legally, and the hundred deaths that followed forced America to make drugs prove they are safe

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The gold Pioneer plaque engraved with a nude man and woman, a hydrogen atom symbol and a radiating pulsar map, on a dark background

Science & Tech

We engraved a naked man, a naked woman and a map to Earth on a gold plate and threw it into the galaxy, and almost no one will ever see it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

A tray of ominous vintage mid-20th-century steel surgical instruments in a stark clinical setting, evoking the era of the lobotomy

Science & Tech

A brain operation that blunted people for life was called a miracle, won its inventor a Nobel Prize, and was carried across America with an ice pick

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The 1936 Stout Scarab, a rounded streamlined beetle-shaped car with smooth metal bodywork, parked on a street

Science & Tech

An aircraft engineer built a roomy, flat-floored family van with a rear engine in 1936, and the world was not ready to buy the future

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

The Aerocar, a small 1950s roadable aircraft with a car body, propeller tail and detachable wings, parked on an airfield

Science & Tech

A man built a car that unfolded its wings and flew, got the government to approve it, and still could not sell the dream of a flying car

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The 1933 Dymaxion car, a long silver teardrop-shaped aluminium vehicle on three wheels, parked on a street with onlookers

Science & Tech

A teardrop car on three wheels looked like the future in 1933, until one deadly crash and a cover-up turned it into a headline nobody would fund

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

A vintage brass telegraph key on a wooden desk beside a paper tape of dots and dashes, evoking Samuel Morse and the birth of the telegraph

Science & Tech

A painter learned his wife had died only after she was buried, because news moved so slowly, and his grief helped wire the world for instant messages

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

An Atlas-Agena rocket carrying Mariner 1 lifting off from Cape Canaveral in 1962 on a pillar of flame against a clear sky

Science & Tech

A single missing mark in a line of code helped destroy America's first mission to another planet, five minutes after it left the pad

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The Wright brothers' fragile 1903 Flyer lifting off the sand at Kitty Hawk, one brother at the controls and the other running alongside

Science & Tech

The Wright brothers invented the airplane and then spent a decade in court trying to own it, and many believe the fight handed the future of flight to Europe

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

An ornate, empty early-1900s theatre interior with gilded balconies and rows of seats, evoking the Iroquois Theatre before the fire

Science & Tech

A brand-new theatre sold to the public as absolutely fireproof became the site of the deadliest building fire in American history, and quietly rewrote the way every exit is built

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

A cluster of bright yellow, pink and blue Post-it notes stuck at angles on a plain wall, some curling at the corners

Science & Tech

A chemist accidentally made a glue that barely stuck, spent years unable to find a use for it, and then a choir singer turned the useless failure into the Post-it note

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

The broken but well-preserved wreck of the Lady Be Good B-24 bomber resting on the empty sand of the Libyan Sahara under a clear sky

Science & Tech

An American bomber flew off into the North African night in 1943 and simply disappeared, and fifteen years later it turned up nearly intact deep in the empty Sahara

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

Extreme close-up of a single clear drop of Super Glue instantly bonding a fingertip to a metal surface under bright studio light

Science & Tech

A chemist trying to build clear plastic gun sights kept making a goo that ruined everything it touched, and years later that same sticky failure became Super Glue

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

The Genesis probe return capsule cracked open and partly buried in the cracked mud of the Utah desert after crashing without a parachute

Science & Tech

In 2004 a NASA capsule carrying pieces of the Sun slammed into the Utah desert at nearly 200 miles an hour because its sensors had been installed upside down, and scientists saved the mission anyway

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The 1970s Skylab space station with its gold sun shield and windmill-like solar panels orbiting above the blue curve of the Earth against black space

Science & Tech

In 1979 America's first space station fell out of orbit and rained flaming debris across the Australian outback, and the whole world spent weeks nervously asking where it would hit

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

A small sparse desert town in the California Mojave near Hinkley, with scattered houses and a water tower amid dry scrub, the setting of the Erin Brockovich case

Science & Tech

A single mother with no legal training took on a giant California utility over poisoned water, won a record settlement, and became the most famous name in environmental law

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

The Trinity test fireball, a brilliant orange-white dome of light rising over the dark New Mexico desert horizon before dawn in 1945

Science & Tech

In 1945 a team of physicists gathered in the New Mexico desert before dawn, set off the first atomic bomb, and watched a false sunrise that changed the world forever

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

A close-up of an early 1980s medicine bottle with a foil safety seal over its mouth beside a sealed carton, evoking the Tylenol murders and tamper-evident packaging

Science & Tech

In 1982 seven people near Chicago died from cyanide hidden in Tylenol capsules, and the terror of it is the reason every pill bottle and food jar you own now comes sealed shut

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

A misty New England country graveyard at dusk with old slate headstones under bare trees, evoking the Mercy Brown vampire case

Science & Tech

In 1892 a Rhode Island farmer was pressured to dig up his dead daughter, burn her heart, and feed the ashes to his dying son to stop a vampire that was really tuberculosis

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

The word CROATOAN carved into a weathered wooden palisade post at the deserted site of the Roanoke Colony

Science & Tech

In 1590 an English governor sailed back to his New World colony with supplies and found all 115 men, women and children gone, leaving only a single word carved into a wooden post

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

A large 1950s cylindrical metal iron lung respirator with a padded headrest and an angled mirror above it in a quiet hospital room

Science & Tech

For decades a huge metal cylinder breathed for people whose lungs had failed, and long after a vaccine made it obsolete a handful of Americans still spent their entire lives sealed inside one

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

An aerial view of the Serpent Mound in Ohio, a long grassy earthwork shaped like a coiled snake winding across a green plateau

Science & Tech

A quarter-mile-long serpent lies coiled in the hills of Ohio, built by Native Americans on top of an ancient crater, and after 150 years of study nobody is sure how old it is

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

An open metal bomb-shaped canister in the sky with small bats flying out of it, the concept behind the bat bomb

Science & Tech

During World War II the United States seriously built a bomb packed with a thousand live bats, each carrying a tiny firebomb, and in one test the bats escaped and burned down their own airfield

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

An 1880 rooftop apparatus with a mirror and lens aimed at the sun, the setup Alexander Graham Bell used for the photophone

Science & Tech

In 1880 Alexander Graham Bell sent the sound of his own voice through open air on a beam of sunlight, called it the greatest invention of his life, and then watched the world forget it for a hundred years

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

A fenced wooded research plot with numbered markers and a locked gate, the kind of outdoor forensic site known as a body farm

Science & Tech

On a quiet wooded hillside in Tennessee, scientists lay out donated human bodies to rot in the open air on purpose, and what they have learned has helped solve thousands of murders

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

A Midwestern town flattened into splintered wood after the 1925 Tri-State Tornado under a dark churning sky

Science & Tech

In 1925 a single tornado tore 219 miles across three states in about three hours, killed 695 people, and hardly anyone saw it coming because forecasters were forbidden to say the word tornado

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The streamlined boat-shaped Stanley Steamer racer speeding along a hard sand beach in 1906 throwing up a fine spray

Science & Tech

In 1906 a steam-powered car became the fastest thing on Earth, roaring down a Florida beach at nearly 128 miles an hour, faster than any gasoline car of its day

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

A recreation of Grover Cleveland's secret surgery aboard a yacht in 1893, surgeons around a reclining patient in a wood-panelled cabin

Science & Tech

In 1893 a sitting American president slipped aboard a yacht, had a cancerous tumor secretly cut out of his mouth at sea, and the country did not learn the truth for 24 years

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft approaching the red planet against black space

Science & Tech

NASA lost a 327 million dollar spacecraft at Mars because one team wrote its numbers in metric units and another read them in imperial, and no one caught the mistake until it was gone

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

A black nonstick Teflon-coated frying pan with an egg sliding across its slick surface

Science & Tech

A chemist chasing a better fridge gas opened a gas cylinder that had turned into a slippery white powder by accident, and that mistake became Teflon, the atom-bomb material now coating half the pans on Earth

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

The vast Sedan crater blasted into the Nevada desert by a Project Plowshare nuclear test

Science & Tech

The United States seriously tried to dig canals and harbors with nuclear bombs, blasting a crater the size of a stadium into the Nevada desert and coming within a whisker of nuking the coast of Alaska

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The Hubble Space Telescope in orbit above the blue curve of the Earth

Science & Tech

NASA launched the most powerful telescope ever built and discovered its mirror was ground to precisely the wrong shape, so astronauts had to fly up and fit the Hubble with contact lenses

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

An artist's view of a brilliant cosmic ray streaking down over the dark Utah desert sky

Science & Tech

In 1991 a single invisible particle slammed into the sky over Utah carrying the energy of a fast-pitched baseball, and physicists still cannot explain what in the universe could have made it

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

A young 1970s engineer holding the first bulky prototype digital camera with a cassette recorder in a Kodak lab

Science & Tech

A 24-year-old engineer at Kodak invented the world's first digital camera in 1975, and his bosses buried it because they were terrified it would kill the film that made them rich

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

A steaming Yellowstone hot spring ringed with thermophile mats, the source of Thermus aquaticus and its Taq polymerase enzyme

Science & Tech

A scientist was told nothing could live in Yellowstone's boiling springs, but the microbe Thomas Brock found there in 1966 gave the world Taq polymerase, the enzyme that makes every PCR and COVID test possible

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

An aerial view of Dry Falls in the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington, a vast dry cataract carved by Ice Age floods

Science & Tech

A high-school teacher turned geologist said a flood bigger than every river on Earth carved eastern Washington, and colleagues mocked J Harlen Bretz for forty years before the Channeled Scablands proved him right

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

The Arecibo Observatory, a 305-meter radio telescope dish set in a green sinkhole in Puerto Rico

Science & Tech

For 53 years the giant Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico found the first planets beyond our sun and beamed a message to the stars, then in 2020 its 900-ton platform tore loose and crashed into the jungle

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

The Berkeley Pit, a mile-wide flooded copper mine in Butte, Montana, its acidic rust-colored water ringed by terraced rock walls

Science & Tech

Thousands of geese fell dead onto a Montana lake so acidic it dissolves metal, then two chemists found the microbes thriving in the Berkeley Pit were making new cancer and antibiotic drugs

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A relief map of Zealandia, Earth's hidden eighth continent, mostly submerged around New Zealand

Science & Tech

For centuries maps showed seven continents, but a team led by geologist Nick Mortimer proved Earth has an eighth, a nearly five million square kilometer continent called Zealandia hiding almost entirely underwater

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

The Green Bank Telescope rising over the National Radio Quiet Zone in West Virginia at dawn

Science & Tech

In America's most wired age, a 13,000 square mile radio quiet zone bans WiFi and cell phones so one West Virginia telescope can hear a whisper from across the universe

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A sleek black SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance jet flying high above the clouds

Science & Tech

The SR-71 Blackbird flew so fast that its answer to an incoming missile was simply to accelerate away, and in 24 years not one was ever shot down

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A large antique Fresnel lens of concentric glass prism rings glowing inside a lighthouse lantern room

Science & Tech

A frail French physicist sliced a giant lens into rings of glass, and his Fresnel lens turned feeble lighthouse lamps into beams that could be seen 20 miles out to sea

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

Plain white pills spilling from a small unlabeled bottle, representing the placebo effect

Science & Tech

A sugar pill with no medicine in it can genuinely ease pain and illness, and the placebo effect is so strange that it even works when patients know the pill is fake

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A macro photograph of a human eye surrounded by a soft explosion of vivid rainbow colours, evoking tetrachromacy

Science & Tech

Most of us see about a million colors, but a rare few people, almost all of them women, have a condition called tetrachromacy that may let them see a hundred million

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A collection of glossy dark brown and amber vintage Bakelite objects, an old radio, telephone handset, buttons and jewelry

Science & Tech

In 1907 a chemist named Leo Baekeland cooked up Bakelite, the first material never found in nature, and without quite meaning to he launched the age of plastic

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A simple mirror box therapy device on a table, a vertical mirror reflecting a hand, used to treat phantom limb pain

Science & Tech

Amputees can feel agonizing pain in a hand that is no longer there, and a neuroscientist found he could ease the phantom limb with nothing more than a cheap mirror

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A 19th-century inventor's cluttered workbench covered with lumps of raw rubber, jars of sulfur and tools, evoking Charles Goodyear's experiments

Science & Tech

Charles Goodyear spent his life and his family's fortune obsessed with fixing rubber, and he finally cracked it, only to die deeply in debt while others grew rich

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A large flock of migratory birds flying in formation across a vast dusk sky over the sea, an example of magnetoreception in action

Science & Tech

Migratory birds cross whole oceans without a map, and the leading explanation for their magnetoreception is that they may literally see the Earth's magnetic field using quantum physics in their eyes

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

An early 20th-century industrial air conditioning machine with metal cooling coils and pipes in a factory

Science & Tech

Willis Carrier did not invent air conditioning to keep people cool, he built it in 1902 to stop humidity from smudging the ink at a Brooklyn printing plant

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A mid-19th-century physician like Ignaz Semmelweis washing his hands in a basin in a dim hospital ward by lamplight

Science & Tech

Ignaz Semmelweis found a way to stop mothers dying in childbirth simply by washing hands, and for telling the truth too soon he was mocked, broken and locked away

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

The barren dark volcanic island of Surtsey with a cinder cone rising from a grey ocean off Iceland

Science & Tech

In 1963 a fishing crew watched smoke rise from the empty ocean off Iceland, and within days a brand new island named Surtsey had been born

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A huge nuclear mushroom cloud from the Castle Bravo test rising over a Pacific atoll at dawn

Science & Tech

American scientists expected Castle Bravo to be a routine hydrogen bomb test, but a single mistake about lithium made it explode nearly three times too big and poison the Pacific

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

The first black hole image, a glowing fiery orange ring of light around a dark circular shadow at its center against the black of space

Science & Tech

A black hole swallows even light, so it should be impossible to photograph, yet in 2019 a team turned the whole planet into a telescope and captured the first image of one

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A small dark grey crystalline LK-99 fragment tilted and partially hovering above a silver magnet on a lab bench near tweezers

Science & Tech

For a few electric weeks in 2023 the whole world believed a Korean crystal called LK-99 was a room-temperature superconductor that would change everything, and then it quietly fell apart

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

The Voyager 1 space probe with its golden dish antenna and long instrument booms drifting alone against the stars of interstellar space

Science & Tech

A 47-year-old spacecraft 15 billion miles away started sending home gibberish, and NASA engineers had to debug and reprogram Voyager 1 across a signal that takes almost a full day to arrive

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A woman smiling warmly in soft light, healthy and hopeful after a CRISPR sickle cell gene therapy transformed her life

Science & Tech

Victoria Gray spent her whole life crippled by the agony of sickle cell disease, until doctors rewrote the genes in her own blood with CRISPR and the pain simply stopped

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A woman recovering in a hospital bed by a bright window after a pig kidney transplant, a faint hopeful smile

Science & Tech

A woman from Alabama who spent nine years on dialysis lived a record 130 days with a gene-edited pig kidney, the longest anyone has ever survived on an animal organ

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A gloved scientist examines dark grains from asteroid Bennu in a sealed laboratory chamber under bright light

Science & Tech

NASA flew billions of miles to scoop a few spoonfuls of a dark asteroid called Bennu, and the dust came back carrying almost every ingredient life needs to begin

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

Norman Borlaug, the agronomist credited with saving a billion lives, inspecting ripe wheat in a golden field

Science & Tech

A quiet plant breeder from Iowa is said to have saved a billion lives, and almost no one knows his name

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

Karen Wetterhahn, a chemist, holding a small clear vial under a fume hood in a university chemistry laboratory

Science & Tech

A single drop of clear liquid soaked through Karen Wetterhahn's glove, and ten months later it took her life

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

An ancient clay tablet covered in rows of Linear B syllabic symbols

Science & Tech

The architect who read a 3,000-year-old script the experts gave up on

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

Mary Anning searching for fossils with a basket and hammer beneath the cliffs at Lyme Regis

Science & Tech

The poor girl who found the sea dragons and got none of the credit

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

Garrett Morgan, an early 20th-century Black inventor, with his safety hood breathing device

Science & Tech

He saved lives in a smoke-filled tunnel, then was written out of the story

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

Clever Hans, a horse tapping its hoof before a crowd in early 1900s Berlin

Science & Tech

The horse that seemed to do math, and the trick no one meant to play

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A 1980s Therac-25 style radiation therapy machine aimed at an empty treatment table in a hospital room

Science & Tech

The radiation machine whose software quietly killed its patients

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A large brass Foucault pendulum bob hanging on a long wire and swinging beneath a grand domed ceiling

Science & Tech

The swinging weight that let people watch the Earth turn

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A white twin-engine airliner gliding silently toward a remote runway, the Gimli Glider making its powerless descent

Science & Tech

The jet that ran out of fuel at 41,000 feet and glided to safety

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A simple glass electrolysis cell with electrodes and bubbling liquid on a lab bench, evoking the cold fusion experiment

Science & Tech

In 1989 two chemists said they had bottled the power of the sun, and for weeks the world believed them

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A forensic cotton swab sealed in a clear evidence tube on a steel lab table, central to the Phantom of Heilbronn case

Science & Tech

Police hunted a serial killer for 16 years, then found she was a woman in a swab factory

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A late-1980s computer terminal screen filling with system error messages, evoking the Morris worm

Science & Tech

A student wrote a tiny program to measure the internet, and accidentally crashed a tenth of it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

An old coffee machine in a 1990s computer lab with a small early video camera on a tripod pointed at it, the first webcam

Science & Tech

The world's first webcam was invented just to watch a pot of coffee

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A 1968 conference stage where Douglas Engelbart gave the Mother of All Demos before a darkened auditorium

Science & Tech

In 1968 one man showed off the mouse, hyperlinks and video calls in a single demo

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

Hedy Lamarr, a glamorous 1940s film star, working at a desk with engineering sketches

Science & Tech

Hollywood's most glamorous star spent her nights inventing the radio trick that powers WiFi

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

Barry Marshall, a 1980s doctor, holding a beaker of murky liquid culture in a laboratory

Science & Tech

Doctors laughed at his idea about ulcers, so he drank a glass of bacteria to prove them wrong

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

Clair Patterson, a 1950s geochemist, working at a mass spectrometer in a spotless clean room

Science & Tech

He weighed the Earth's true age, then found the whole planet was being quietly poisoned

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

Le Gentil, an 18th-century French astronomer, at a brass telescope beside a colonial observatory under a clear sky

Science & Tech

He sailed the world for 11 years to watch Venus, saw nothing, and came home a dead man

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

Stanislav Petrov, a lone Soviet officer, at a 1980s early-warning command center lit by alert screens

Science & Tech

His screen said five nuclear missiles were inbound, and he chose to call it a glitch

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A visualisation of a single-atom-thick graphene sheet as a glowing blue honeycomb lattice

Science & Tech

Two scientists peeled the strongest material on Earth off a pencil with sticky tape

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A white Finn Dorset ewe in a 1990s research barn, representing Dolly the sheep

Science & Tech

She was cloned from a single adult cell, and the world feared she had been born old

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A 1960s woman scientist beside a tall stack of printed Apollo source code, evoking Margaret Hamilton

Science & Tech

When the computer cried for help during the Moon landing, Margaret Hamilton's code saved the day

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A Chinese woman scientist in a 1970s laboratory studying plant extracts, evoking Tu Youyou's malaria research

Science & Tech

She had no PhD, found a malaria cure in a 1,600-year-old book, and tested it on herself

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A single bright blue LED glowing on a circuit board in a dim laboratory

Science & Tech

He cracked the blue LED that giants gave up on, and his reward was a $180 bonus

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

An aerial view of the L-shaped LIGO gravitational waves observatory with two 4-kilometre arms meeting at a right angle

Science & Tech

Two black holes collided 1.3 billion years ago, and in 2015 a machine on Earth felt the wobble it made, a shudder smaller than a proton

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A translucent bluish block of aerogel glowing like solid frozen smoke against a dark background

Science & Tech

A chemist won a bet in 1931 and created frozen smoke, the lightest solid on Earth, that now catches stardust and shields Mars rovers

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The DART spacecraft approaching the asteroid Dimorphos moments before impact

Science & Tech

NASA crashed a fridge-sized spacecraft into an asteroid at 14,000 mph on purpose, and for the first time ever humanity moved another world

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The James Webb Space Telescope deployed in deep space with its golden hexagonal mirror above the silver sunshield

Science & Tech

A $10 billion telescope had to unfold itself like origami a million miles from Earth, with 344 ways to fail and no one able to fix it

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A crumpled foil object half coated in Vantablack so the black side looks like a flat featureless hole with no visible folds

Science & Tech

One artist bought the exclusive right to the blackest colour ever made, so a rival invented the pinkest pink and banned him from buying it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A white research-farm spider goats doe in a clean pen with a dew-covered spider web in the foreground

Science & Tech

Spiders are too vicious to farm, so scientists hid their silk gene in goats and now milk it out

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The huge spherical fusion target chamber of the National Ignition Facility studded with laser ports

Science & Tech

For a fraction of a second, 192 lasers recreated the heart of the sun and, for the first time, fusion gave back more energy than it took

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The glowing interior of a doughnut-shaped tokamak fusion reactor with a ring of superheated orange plasma swirling inside

Science & Tech

China's artificial sun held a 100-million-degree plasma steady for 1,066 seconds, becoming the first reactor ever to break the 1,000-second wall

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

Scientists on a wooden balcony watching instruments above the dark graphite reactor of Chicago Pile-1

Science & Tech

In 1942 a refugee physicist lit the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction inside a squash court under a Chicago football stadium

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A small lab-grown diamond battery cell containing carbon-14, held in tweezers under bright laboratory light

Science & Tech

Scientists in Bristol found a way to turn the most stubborn kind of nuclear waste into a tiny diamond battery that powers itself for thousands of years

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The TMSR-LF1 thorium molten salt reactor, a remote experimental nuclear facility standing alone in the Gobi Desert at golden hour

Science & Tech

In the Gobi Desert China just got the only reactor on Earth to breed uranium-233 from thorium, six decades after the US walked away from the idea

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

Two large fluffy white wolf pups from the Colossal dire wolf de-extinction project sitting together in a snowy pine forest

Science & Tech

A US company says it brought back the dire wolf, extinct for 12,500 years, by rewriting 20 genes in a grey wolf

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

The corroded green bronze Antikythera mechanism, the ancient Greek computer, displayed in a museum with gear wheels visible

Science & Tech

In 1901 Greek sponge divers pulled a lump of bronze from a shipwreck, and it turned out to be a 2,000-year-old computer of gears that could predict eclipses

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A nuclear power plant with twin cooling towers beside a vast modern data center building under a dramatic sky

Science & Tech

Big Tech is restarting a dead nuclear reactor to feed its AI, with Microsoft paying to bring 835 megawatts back online at Three Mile Island

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 23, 2026