New Horizons

Scientists have found a way to use sunlight to break down plastic waste and turn it into clean hydrogen fuel — hitting two crises with one beam of light.

A black hole and a neutron star were caught spiraling into each other on an oval-shaped orbit — the first time this has ever been seen. It suggests the universe is far more chaotic and surprising in how it births these extreme objects than scientists had assumed.

Almost every factory, steel plant, and cement works on Earth bleeds enormous amounts of heat into the air — wasted energy that cannot be recovered. A new catalyst from the University of Birmingham changes that equation by using this waste heat to split water into clean hydrogen fuel.

Researchers in Germany have demonstrated that ordinary WiFi routers — the kind in every home, café, and office — can identify individuals with 99.5% accuracy, without a camera, without a microphone, and without any device on your person.

Quantum computers have always needed to be cooled to near absolute zero — colder than outer space. A team at Stanford has built a device that sidesteps that requirement entirely, using a peculiar property of light.

For the first time, a vaccine whose active ingredient was designed entirely by artificial intelligence — not just assisted by it — has passed its first human trial. It targets every known coronavirus at once, including strains that do not yet exist.

NASA is preparing to launch its most ambitious sky-mapping mission yet. The Roman Space Telescope will scan regions of our galaxy that have never been explored and could discover more alien worlds than all previous missions combined.

For decades, scientists searched the wrong place for how pigeons navigate. A new study reveals the answer was hiding in an organ nobody expected — and it might tell us something about ourselves too.

Metal detectorists in eastern Norway have unearthed over 3,000 silver coins buried around 1050 AD — the largest Viking coin hoard ever found in Norway, from the very end of the Viking Age.

In 2026, the question of AI consciousness moved from science fiction to serious philosophy — with researchers publishing urgent new frameworks, and no consensus in sight.

Scientists from Project CETI have discovered that sperm whale clicks contain vowel-like sounds organised by the same structural rules found in human languages — from Mandarin to Slovenian.

Deep beneath East Africa's Turkana Rift, the continental crust has thinned to a critical point — geological evidence that a new ocean is being born, one centimetre at a time.

The next wave of AI is not a single, smarter model. It is dozens of specialised AI "agents" that coordinate with each other like a research team, each doing what it does best.

Mathematicians discovered two doughnut-shaped surfaces that look identical when measured locally but are completely different overall — overturning a longstanding rule about shape and space.

Lithium has powered our devices for decades — but it's scarce and expensive to mine. A simpler alternative is arriving: batteries made from sodium, one of the most abundant elements on Earth. Essentially salt. And it might quietly change how the world stores energy.

Scientists have grown and harvested chickpeas in simulated moon dirt. The key ingredients: worm compost and symbiotic fungi. A small harvest with enormous implications for how humans might one day live on the Moon.

Amino acids come in two mirror-image forms. Life uses almost exclusively one. Scientists have now found that the other version can sneak inside certain cancer cells and quietly shut them down, leaving healthy cells untouched.

From bacteria to lizards, every living thing on Earth follows the same underlying curve when it comes to temperature. Scientists at Trinity College Dublin have found the universal rule — and it raises a sobering question about life's ability to adapt to a warming world.