The fiber-optic cables that carry the internet across ocean basins turn out to double as whale detectors: a diving whale's body pushes a pressure wave that registers as a faint strain in the glass. That means silent, non-vocalizing cetaceans can be tracked using infrastructure already lying on the seabed, with no new instruments dropped in the water.
A wearable radiation vest rode to lunar orbit and back, and the dosimeters say it worked. The logic is a shift for spaceflight design: rather than armoring the whole spacecraft, shield the few kilograms of astronaut that actually matter.
Diamond does two odd jobs: it encases fusion fuel pellets, and it is thought to fall as rain deep inside Neptune and Uranus. Experiments and simulations had long disagreed about how it behaves when crushed and melted; a new measurement settles the argument, and points toward tripling the energy gain from inertial confinement fusion.
A startup has been cleared to test bouncing sunlight off an orbiting mirror down onto solar farms after dark, with an eventual goal of up to 50,000 such satellites by 2035. Astronomers, wildlife biologists and sleep researchers have started petitioning, on the grounds that nobody has previously had to argue about the legal status of artificial sunbeams.
Someone woke a sleeping polar bear with a foghorn and has been fined for it. Local rules are explicit that it is forbidden to needlessly disturb, attract or pursue a polar bear, a sentence that presumably exists because people keep trying.
Ticklishness maps almost identically from person to person: armpits, ribs, feet, neck. Researchers probing gargalesis, the firm repetitive kind of tickling that produces helpless laughter, are using that consistency to ask what the reflex was ever for.
A sea slug with no skeleton solves the control problem of a boneless body by temporarily rearranging its own anatomy while feeding, effectively reducing the number of ways it can move. It's a trick that octopus arms, elephant trunks and human tongues all have to manage somehow: too many degrees of freedom, not enough nerves to steer them.
Someone followed 657,607 links to see what remains at the other end, and produced a decay curve for the web's own memory. The result is a measurement of how quickly the internet forgets, one dead URL at a time.
Not all heat waves are alike, and a newly named type does its damage in the mountains: "snow-eaters," humid warm spells that strip western US snowpack far faster than dry heat does, because moist air delivers heat to snow more efficiently. Snowpack is the region's reservoir, and this variety drains it early.
Romania has shut down its only nuclear plant because the Danube is too low to cool it. The plant normally supplies about a fifth of the country's electricity, and operators had tried to keep part of it running before conceding to the river.