Science & TechnologyS


Earthquake

Deep beneath Swiss Alps, researchers trigger 8,000 tiny quakes in controlled test

Nina Larson
Phys.org
Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00 UTC
ETH professor geology
© UnknownETH Zurich professor of geology Domenico Giardini inside BedrettoLab
Researchers have made the ground shake in southern Switzerland, triggering thousands of tiny earthquakes in a monitored setting, as they seek to discover seismicity insights that could reduce risks.

"It was a success!" said Domenico Giardini, one of the lead researchers on the project, as he inspected a crack in the rock wall lining a narrow tunnel far below the Swiss Alps.

Wearing a fluorescent orange jumpsuit and helmet, the geology professor at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) switched on his headlight to get a better look.

"We had seismicity," he said excitedly, explaining that the goal was "to understand what happens at depth when Earth moves."

Giardini was standing in the BedrettoLab carved out in the middle of a narrow 5.2-kilometer (3.2-mile) ventilation tunnel leading to the Furka railway tunnel.

Reached by specially adapted electric vehicles that slide through the dank darkness along concrete slabs laid over a muddy dirt floor, the deep underground laboratory is the ideal location to create and study earthquakes, Giardini said.
"It is perfect, because we have a kilometer and a half of mountain on top of us... and we can look very close at the faults, how they move, when they move, and we can make them move ourselves."
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Lightning

What causes lightning? The answer keeps getting more complex and interesting

Charlie Wood
Quanta Magazine
Wed, 06 May 2026 20:03 UTC
satellite photo lightning strike earth
© NASA/Quanta MagazineAt any given moment, more than 2,000 thunderstorms are occurring around the globe, according to NASA
Armed with a slew of new instruments, physicists are closing in on one of nature's oldest mysteries — and finding that storm clouds are seething with violent and unexpected phenomena.

Before he changed the way we understand lightning on Earth, Joseph Dwyer studied the weather in more cosmic settings. Using the sensors on NASA's Wind satellite orbiting a million miles away, he watched flares shoot out from the sun and analyzed the particles that stream from the sun's surface. But when he relocated to Florida around the turn of the millennium, Dwyer felt ready for something new — something he and his students could investigate on their own. It didn't take long before the tropical weather delivered a suitable mystery outside his office window. "It was like boom, boom, boom outside," Dwyer said. "I looked into it and realized lightning was an unsolved problem."

Thunderstorms have captivated humanity for millennia, and yet their inner workings remain deeply mysterious. Storm clouds are opaque. They're dangerous to approach. And they're too big to fit in a lab. Inquisitive researchers have been sending kites, balloons, and rockets up into them for nearly three centuries, and they've learned a lot. But every time lightning lovers get closer to the action, they discover major gaps in their understanding. For the past 50 years, researchers have focused on one particular gap: How does the jagged channel of white-hot air we call a lightning bolt get started?
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Butterfly

25 people learned to fly with virtual wings. Here's how the brain changed

Yujia Huang
Science News
Fri, 08 May 2026 20:34 UTC
virtual reality training wings brain plasticity
© Ziyi Xiong,∙ Yiyang Cai, et alIn a new study, volunteers were trained to move wings in VR to study brain plasticity when presented with novel movement information
After flight training, the brain began treating wings more like real limbs

In X-Men, Warren Worthington III sprouts huge white wings from his back and shoots into the sky. Scientists have yet to fully turn the comic book gift from fiction into fact, but virtual reality is offering hints of what it's like to learn to fly.

After training to use virtual wings, people's brains responded to wings more similarly to how they respond to real limbs, making wings seem more like body parts, researchers report May 7 in Cell Reports.

"This is an intriguing study that nicely demonstrates how plastic the brain is," says cognitive neuroscientist Jane Aspell of Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England. "If the brain can incorporate something as unhuman as a wing, it may also be able to incorporate many other kinds of limb enhancements."

The study started because cognitive neuroscientist Yanchao Bi of Peking University in Beijing has long dreamed of flying on her own. "It would be amazing," she says. "Your whole world would become different."
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Network

May 3, 1978: Spam—not the tasty kind—debuted on this day

Amy McKenna
Britannica
Sun, 03 May 2026 15:11 UTC
early apple computer
© Tom Kelly/Getty
On this day in 1978, a marketing manager for a Massachusetts computer company unknowingly made history: He sent the first spam email.

The Internet as we know it did not yet exist. But ARPANET, an experimental computer network that connected government-supported research sites in the United States, was up and running — albeit with a much, much smaller audience than the Internet has now. There was an actual printed directory of ARPANET users — all 2,600 of them.

Gary Thuerk, of the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), was pondering how to advertise upcoming demonstrations in California of his company's latest computers. In a moment of inspiration, he decided to send an invitation, which also touted the products, via ARPANET to about 400 people on the West Coast he found in the directory.
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Volcano

Yellowstone's volcanic magma may flow in a very different way than we thought

Sarah Wild
Live Science
Sat, 02 May 2026 21:48 UTC
yellowstone caldera volcano
© evenfh via Getty ImagesThe Grand Prismatic Spring located in Yellowstone National Park. New research suggests Yellowstone's magma plumbing system doesn't work the way we thought it did.
Yellowstone's famous supervolcano is likely being fueled in a completely different way from what many scientists assumed. New research suggests that Yellowstone's volcanic activity is actually driven by shifts in Earth's crust, rather than a deep well of magma underground as previously thought.

This finding could help scientists predict future volcanic activity and better understand how the volcano will behave.

The Yellowstone area, where Earth's crust is relatively thin, is a hotbed of volcanic activity. In the last 2.1 million years, Yellowstone has seen three major eruptions, with the most recent taking place 631,000 years ago. The last supereruption created the Yellowstone caldera, which is more than 30 miles (50 kilometers) wide. A caldera is the bowl-shaped depression left in the ground after the volcano's molten rock has exploded to the surface.
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Rocket

Used SpaceX rocket believed to be on a collision course with the moon

Brandon Specktor
Live Science
Fri, 01 May 2026 15:24 UTC
upper stage space x rocket
© Space XThis is the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket.
A discarded piece of a SpaceX rocket carelessly left adrift in space will likely crash into the moon this summer, a new report finds.

The renegade rocket poses no risk to the moon or any working spacecraft, the report stresses. However, the collision — which is predicted to occur Aug. 5 on the border of the moon's near and far sides — may be of "minor scientific interest" if it creates a new crater that can later be studied.

What's happening on the moon?

The object in question is a 45-foot-tall (13.8 meters) upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket that launched in early 2025 and has been orbiting the Earth-moon system ever since. The rocket delivered two spacecraft to the moon — the Blue Ghost lander (developed by private company Firefly Aerospace), which successfully touched down on the moon in March 2025; and the Hakuto-R lander (developed by Japanese company ispace), which lost contact with Earth and crash-landed on the moon later that June.
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Roses

Scientists create first-ever 'smell map' of olfactory nerves

Catherine Caruso
Harvard Medical School
Tue, 28 Apr 2026 19:52 UTC
smell mouse nose olfactory nerves map
© Datta LabA microscope photo of a cross section of a mouse nose. The mouse was genetically modified to express green fluorescent protein in smell neurons. A small subset of dying neurons is labeled in red.
A detailed diagram of smell receptors in the nose fills in missing details of how olfaction works

While the smell map is an exciting discovery in its own right, Datta said, it also provides foundational information that could help scientists develop therapies for loss of smell, which are currently lacking.

"We cannot fix smell without understanding how it works on a basic level," he said.

The findings published April 28 in Cell.

A missing map

Maps have long existed that describe how receptors in the eye, ear, and skin are organized to capture and interpret auditory, visual, and touch information — and scientists have figured how these maps correspond with those inside the brain.

However, "olfaction has been the one exception; it's the sense that has been missing a map for the longest time," Datta said.
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Rose

How a humble weed became a superstar of biology

Rachel Ehrenberg
Knowable Magazine
Sun, 23 Nov 2025 21:52 UTC
Arabidopsis thaliana mustard family biology research genetics
© Shaw NielsenMajor discoveries in biology have come from studies of simple, easy-to-work-with organisms, including bacteria, yeast, fruit flies and zebra fish. Arabidopsis, a weed in the mustard family, joined the celebrity ranks as one of these “model organisms” in the 1980s.
Arabidopsis thaliana was always an unlikely candidate for the limelight. But 25 years ago, the diminutive thale cress launched the botanical world into the molecular era.

In November of 1956, after weeks of protests and calls for free elections in Hungary, Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to crush the uprising. Well over a hundred thousand people fled the country seeking asylum. Among them was a young geneticist named George Rédei, who headed for the Austrian border with a small vial of seeds tucked in his pocket.

The seeds belonged to a spindly weed in the mustard family called Arabidopsis thaliana. Today, that weed is widely regarded as a botanical superstar. Arabidopsis has been the focus of some 100,000 research papers. Its seeds have flown around the Moon; it is the go-to plant for experiments on the International Space Station. And when the scientific community decided which plant should be the first to have its genome sequenced, Arabidopsis emerged as the winner. This year marks the 25th anniversary of when the world got its first glimpse at that genome, launching the much-studied plant toward even greater fame and scientific value.
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Volcano

This volcano that 'slept' for 100,000 years was never truly quiet

ETH Zurich
PHYS.ORG
Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:59 UTC
volcanic eruption
© UnknownThe youngest eruption of the Methana volcano (brown) flowing into the sea
For more than 100,000 years, the Methana volcano in Greece appeared dormant. No lava, no explosions, no ash clouds. It appeared extinct, like many other volcanoes today. An international research team led by ETH Zurich has reconstructed a detailed, long-term history of the Methana volcano. Their work is published in the journal Science Advances, and their conclusion is striking: While Methana appeared silent at the surface, enormous amounts of magma were steadily accumulating deep within its magma chambers.

Crystals as witnesses of the past

To uncover the volcano's hidden activity, researchers focused on tiny minerals called zircon. These crystals form inside magma reservoirs in the Earth's crust, as the magma is cooling, and act like natural time capsules, preserving information about when and under what conditions they grew.

Olivier Bachmann, senior author and professor of Volcanology and Magmatic Petrology, ETH Zurich, explains:
"We can think of zircon crystals as tiny flight recorders. By dating more than 1,250 of them across 700,000 years of volcanic history, we've reconstructed the volcano's inner life with a precision and statistical power that simply wasn't possible a decade ago. What we learned is that volcanoes can 'breathe' underground for millennia without ever breaking the surface."
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Bug

Harvard built It. DARPA paid for it. Nobody governs it.

Tracy Beanz & Michelle Edwards
The Highwire
Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00 UTC
xenobots
Scientists at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have created something that did not exist six weeks ago: a tiny living robot with a functional nervous system that it built itself. No plug. No battery. No remote control. The little creature swims, explores its environment, and responds to drugs the way a nervous system is supposed to respond — because it has one. They call it a neurobot. To understand what that means, a bit of context is necessary, because this creature has been decades in the making.

It started in 2020, when the same Wyss Institute team created xenobots — tiny spherical structures assembled from the embryonic skin cells of Xenopus laevis, the African clawed frog, a species that has been a laboratory workhorse for decades. Cut a small piece of tissue from a frog embryo, drop it in a dish, and something strange happens. The cells don't die. They heal themselves into a sphere, sprout hair-like projections called cilia across their surface, and start moving through water — with no scaffold, no genetic manipulation, and no instructions from anyone. Just cells doing what cells apparently do when removed from the body they were meant to build and then are left alone.
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