Comet 3I/ATLAS’s upcoming encounter with the Sun could change that in a big way — Space Photo of the Week
simple facts What is it: Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS extending its tail Location: Inside the solar system, heading towards Mars Share date: September 4, 2025 Even as comets bright to the naked eye tear through Earth’s skies (cheers, Comet Lemon!), the solar system’s most famous object today is hidden behind the sun. It is the interstellar […]
Did Neanderthals eat anything other than meat?
Our extinct cousins, Neanderthals, are often depicted as eating only meat, without any fruits, grains, or vegetables. But did Neanderthals really survive on meat alone? There’s plenty of evidence that Neanderthals regularly ate meat, but a series of studies has shown that our evolutionary relatives, who went extinct more than 30,000 years ago, also ate […]
Who is the AI Browser for?
OpenAI this week released an AI-powered web browser called ChatGPT Atlas. This made me wonder, “Is it finally time to ditch Safari?” This news was on our minds when Max Zeff, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed the browser landscape (including lesser-known alternatives) on the latest episode of the Equity podcast. But I don’t think any […]
TikTok robot star Rizzbot gave me the middle finger
A few Thursdays ago, I woke up at nearly 4:30 a.m. to an Instagram DM that kept me awake. Rizzbot, a child-sized humanoid robot developed by Unitree Robotics with a large following on social media (more than 1 million followers on TikTok and more than 500,000 followers on Instagram), sent me a photo. He was […]
India, where BlaBlaCar once exited, is now its largest market.
Every few weekends, Lavanya Jain, a 21-year-old student, opens the BlaBlaCar app to find a lift from Noida, a suburb of New Delhi, to her home in Kandla, a small town in northern India’s Uttar Pradesh state. The 120-kilometre journey costs about 500 rupees, or the equivalent of about $6. This is a fraction of […]
‘I screamed with excitement’: 2,700-year-old cuneiform text discovered near the Temple Mount reveals Judah’s late payments to Assyrians
A 2,700-year-old pottery shard discovered near Jerusalem’s Temple Mount is the first known correspondence between the kingdoms of Assyria and Judah ever found in Jerusalem. The 1-inch (2.5 centimeter) long shard (a term used by archaeologists to describe pottery shards) is covered in cuneiform writing and dates to the First Temple period (1000-586 B.C.). It […]
Study finds that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines can force the immune system to recognize and kill cancer.
An mRNA-based vaccine for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) that has saved 2.5 million lives worldwide during the pandemic could help revitalize the immune system to fight cancer. This is a surprising finding from new research that we and our colleagues published in Nature. While developing an mRNA vaccine for brain tumor patients in 2016, our team […]
Obvious security risks of AI browser agents
New AI-powered web browsers, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT Atlas and Perplexity’s Comet, are poised to supplant Google Chrome as the gateway to the internet for billions of users. The main selling point of these products is a web-browsing AI agent that promises to complete tasks on your behalf by clicking on websites and filling out […]
This week in science news: Comets light up the sky and hurtle toward the sun, our galaxy’s mysterious glow is explained, and scientists say why time moves faster as we get older
This week’s science news continues with reports of three dusty cosmic snowballs hurtling through our cosmic backyard, with comets gaining momentum. The first are Comets Lemmon and Comet Swan, which peaked in brightness in Earth’s skies this week, allowing skywatchers to easily catch a glimpse of them. This led to some surprising observations, as Lemon […]
Neanderthals were more susceptible to lead poisoning than humans, but this helped humans gain an advantage over their cousins, scientists say
Humans and our ancestors have been exposed to lead for up to two million years, researchers have discovered, overturning the idea that lead poisoning is a relatively modern phenomenon. Additionally, widespread exposure to toxic metals may have influenced the evolution of our species’ ability to communicate. This would have given Homo sapiens an important advantage […]