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Neuropathic pain is, in a sense, a glitch that refuses to self-correct. The original injury heals, or heals as much as it ever will, but the nervous system keeps insisting otherwise, flooding the brain with signals that serve no useful purpose except to make life miserable. Gabapentin is supposed to quiet that noise. For roughly half of patients it does, more or less. For the other half, it simpl…

The heart stops getting blood. Minutes pass, muscle dies, and somewhere across town an ambulance is already moving. Cardiologists will talk about the myocardium, about ejection fractions, about saving the heart. What they talk about rather less is what happens, simultaneously, to the brain. Because something does happen. Something quiet and chemical and, it turns out, rather consequential. Within…

Inside a dendritic cell, something is being decided. The cell has just swallowed a fragment of debris from a dead tumour neighbour and is now, in a sense, reading it, translating molecular scraps into instructions for the immune system’s killer T cells. Whether that message gets through with enough clarity to trigger an effective response turns out to depend not on anything obviously immunologica…

Sand Clouds Form Every Morning and Vanish by Dusk on Distant Gas Giant Artistic representation of WASP-94A b, a gas giant in the Microscopium constellation. Clouds build as air flows over the dark side of the planet, reaching a large swell by daybreak. The clouds dissipate on the dayside, leaving clear skies in the early evening.

The ear appears all at once. A glass vial of clear gel, a stage rotating beneath a 150-milliwatt blue laser diode, a hologram flickering through 1,440 frames per second, and after 2 minutes and 12 seconds, suspended in the middle of the cylinder, a life-size human ear. No layers. No support scaffolding. Just a complete, three-dimensional object that has materialized inside the gel like a photogra…

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They have names that sound borrowed from a fantasy novel: melilitite, nephelinite, ultramafic lamprophyre, kimberlite. Until quite recently they were mostly the preserve of mineralogy textbooks New! Sign up for our email newsletter on Substack. New! Sign up for our email newsletter on Substack. They have names that sound borrowed from a fantasy novel: melilitite, nephelinite, ultramafic lamprophy…

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Somewhere above 4,000 metres on the Tibetan Plateau, a river bend that held its position for decades has begun to slip sideways. Not catastrophically, not in any single moment you could photograph. But over forty years of satellite imagery, the movement is unmistakable: channels that once migrated slowly across their floodplains are now doing so at nearly double the pace. The numbers are large en…

Water, at exactly zero degrees, doesn’t know what it wants to be. Add the tiniest nudge of energy and it stays liquid; subtract the same and it snaps into ice, New! Sign up for our email newsletter on Substack. New! Sign up for our email newsletter on Substack. Water, at exactly zero degrees, doesn’t know what it wants to be. Add the tiniest nudge of energy and it stays liquid; subtract the same …

The storming of the US Capitol in Janu New! Sign up for our email newsletter on Substack.