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Wild bearded capuchin monkeys in Brazil select heavy stones, sometimes weighing more than a kilogram, carry them to anvils and use them to hammer open palm nuts — transporting both tools and food to the places where they can use them effectively.

Natural History

49m ago

Size matters far less than ingenuity when a capuchin monkey tackles a problem that should require a body twice its weight.

The reason decent people fail to do the right thing is rarely bad character: psychology has identified the specific forces that defeat good intentions, from the crowd that dilutes your sense of duty to the good deed that quietly licenses your next lapse

Science Blog Editorial Team

58m ago

Our moral failures rarely stem from corruption—they're engineered by invisible psychological traps that ensnare even our best intentions.

psychologycognitive-psychologybehavioral-science

One tonne of discarded mobile-phone handsets can contain about 130 kilograms of copper, 3.5 kilograms of silver and 300 to 350 grams of gold — valuable metals already mined, refined and concentrated inside the devices.

The Long View

3h ago

The precious metals trapped in your old phones vastly outpace what miners extract from earth—yet we leave most of them to rot in drawers.

If you compressed Earth’s entire atmosphere down to sea-level density, it would form a shell only about eight kilometres thick around a planet with a radius of 6,371 kilometres — thinner, proportionally, than the skin of an apple SD

The Long View

6h ago

We live under an absurdly fragile veil of gas, one that would barely register as a protective layer if you could see our planet whole.

Singapore treats trees as more than decoration: research shows street shade can measurably cool the air around roads, while tree cover near buildings can reduce the demand for air-conditioning in one of Asia’s hottest cities

Daniel Moran

13h ago

In one of the world's hottest cities, Singapore's decades-long tree-planting obsession is paying measurable dividends: cooler streets and lower electricity bills.

environmentsustainabilityurban-studies

A 2026 analysis of 488,765 people followed for as long as 32 years found that a stronger sense of purpose in life was associated with about a 30 per cent lower risk of earlier death

Science Blog Editorial Team

15h ago

A massive study reveals a striking correlation between purpose and longevity—but what it actually proves is far messier than the self-help industry would have you believe.

A fragment of fossil thigh bone was the only piece carrying this specimen’s collection number, and losing it hid where the animal came from for more than 20 years — until the fragment resurfaced in a Porto Alegre university collection and the three bones proved to be a Middle Triassic reptile new to science

Science Blog Editorial Team

16h ago

A misplaced fossil fragment hid a species' identity for two decades until a chance discovery revealed a previously unknown Triassic reptile hiding in plain sight.

biologypaleontology

South Korean men born in 1996 were estimated to be about 15.2 centimetres taller than men born there in 1896 — while South Korean women gained an extraordinary 20.2 centimetres over the same century of birth cohorts.

Lab Report

18h ago

A century of radical transformation reshaped an entire population's body, revealing what nutrition, medicine, and prosperity can accomplish in just a few generations.

Sleep apnea starts with a blocked airway, but some of the damage may travel through the gut: new 2026 research found that patients who also developed hypertension showed altered gut bacteria, weakened intestinal barriers and rising levels of bacterial endotoxin in their blood.

The Long View

18h ago

A small 2026 study links severe sleep apnea and hypertension with altered gut metabolites, intestinal-barrier injury markers and more bacterial endotoxin in blood, without proving causation.

medicineinfectious-disease

James Dyson went through 5,127 prototypes while developing his cyclonic bagless vacuum cleaner — years of iteration that eventually produced the technology on which he built Dyson.

The Long View

19h ago

Most entrepreneurs fail once and quit. Dyson failed 5,126 times before succeeding—and built a $50 billion company on the obsession itself.

technologyinnovation

A natural experiment involving more than 280,000 Welsh adults found that shingles vaccination cut new dementia diagnoses by 20% over seven years. Months later, the same researchers found something even stranger: the apparent benefit extended to people who already had dementia, who were less likely to die from the disease.

The Long View

20h ago

A Welsh birthdate cutoff linked shingles vaccination to fewer new dementia diagnoses, then to fewer dementia-related deaths among people already diagnosed, but the later estimate was imprecise and neither study makes the vaccine a dementia treatment.

medicinepublic-healthepidemiology

The textbook reason insects never colonised the deep ocean is that water pressure would crush their airways — but a larvae living in Lake Malawi dives deeper than 200 metres every single day, protected by air sacs built from a near-perfect biological rubber

Brendan Brown

20h ago

A tiny insect has shattered a century-old explanation for why its relatives never conquered the ocean—by doing the impossible every day.

biologyevolutionecology

Americans throw away 50,000 mattresses every day, and what makes them a landfill nightmare isn’t the foam or chemicals — it’s the steel coils that wrap around compactors and have to be cut free by hand

Brendan Brown

20h ago

A landfill's worst enemy isn't foam or chemicals—it's the metal coils that jam the machinery, forcing workers to cut them free by hand.

environmentpollution

A 2026 study has added to evidence that the gut microbiome may be linked to human cognition, finding genetic signatures associated with particular gut bacteria also associated with cognitive performance — another clue that the gut–brain connection may extend far beyond digestion.

Mind & Matter

21h ago

A 2026 Mendelian-randomization study connected genetic proxies for certain gut bacteria with cognitive performance. The finding is a research clue, not evidence that a probiotic or diet can improve cognition.

biologymicrobiologycognitive-science

A worm frozen in Siberian permafrost for 46,000 years — since woolly mammoths still roamed — was thawed in a lab dish and simply woke up, began eating, and started reproducing, because its species can shut its metabolism down to a complete standstill in a survival state biologists call cryptobiosis

Brendan Brown

21h ago

Life paused for nearly 50,000 years, then resumed the moment conditions allowed—a discovery that raises urgent questions about what else might be waiting to wake up as permafrost thaws.

biologyevolution

American men’s friendship circles shrank dramatically between 1990 and 2021: the share with no close friends rose fivefold, from 3% to 15%, while the share with six or more was cut in half. Women declined too, but the contraction in large friendship networks was sharper among men.

Mind & Matter

22h ago

A 1990-to-2021 survey comparison found a steep contraction in American men’s friendship networks, although a change from phone to online interviewing makes the exact magnitude less certain.

social-sciencesociology

Humans have visually observed less than 0.001 percent of the deep ocean floor — an area roughly the size of Rhode Island — and scientists calculate that even with 1,000 deep-sea vehicles working at today’s average rate, seeing the entire thing once would still take more than 100,000 years.

The Long View

22h ago

A 43,681-dive analysis finds that today's average deep-sea camera system covers just 2.9 square kilometres a year, making exhaustive visual coverage impossible without a different strategy.

earth-scienceoceanography