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Off the Siberian coast, patches of sea over a kilometre wide bubble with methane, and the biggest are growing. Why the climate's methane count may be too low.
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Drilling for oil under the sea, people sequenced the mud and met fungi, bacteria and viruses. One oceanologist says they may outweigh the rest of life on Earth.
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Two cable sensors sat on the seafloor when the 2003 Tokachi-oki quake hit. Their records showed the ocean shaking like jelly and sending sound into the seabed.
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Physics caps how fast any computer can run. An AI expert argues the machine at that cap would look like a black hole, and that this could explain the silent sky.
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In the Mesopotamian flood story of Atrahasis, the gods did not punish sin. Humans multiplied, got too loud, and the gods drowned them for some quiet.
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Fungi that eat plastic are real. A mycologist explains why the people who found one got scared, and what a loose strain could do to a civilisation built on plastic.
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Mycologist Mikhail Vishnevsky on why mycelia never merge: three sibling spores in a dish end up at war, and a fungus waters its birches only for itself.
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In 2021 the Arctic let go of a freshwater lid that could have stopped water sinking in the North Atlantic. An oceanologist explains why we barely noticed.
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Carbon monoxide gives one bright line. A 15-atom molecule gives a comb of faint ones that overlap with dozens of others. Why space's biggest molecules hide.
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A model that can take a million tokens may use only 5–10% of them well. Mikhail Burtsev on why attention blurs, and why a fresh chat often beats a long one.
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Max Talanov, a neural network researcher, wants a brain-to-brain link that passes on neuromodulator levels, so we could finally feel what another person feels.
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Farmers pour 10 million tonnes of fungicide a year on fields. Mycologist Mikhail Vishnevsky says the fungi that survive fly in through hospital windows.
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A human genome cut into ten-letter words runs to 300 million tokens. How a language-model trick lets AI read DNA, and why drug doses and gene therapy are the targets.
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Mesopotamians dug canals and invented writing, yet credited the gods. Historian Olga Popova on a mindset with no inventors and almost no named authors.
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A meter of sea level rise in a century is a building project for rich coasts and an eviction notice for small poor islands, says oceanologist Alexander Osadchiev.
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