The Cave at the End of the Mousterian
There is a cave mouth in the municipality of Aguilón, in Zaragoza province, Aragón, and the mouth is the news. AGP5 — Aguilón P5 — sits in the Iberian Range, and on 2 September 2026 the IUCA group at the University of Zaragoza, with Rafael Domingo's team...
The Circular Ditch in a Czech Field That Watched the Sky
There is a field in the Central Bohemian Region of the Czech Republic, near the village of Chleby, where the soil looks unremarkable and the grass grows normally and there is nothing at all to see unless you bring the right kind of eye. The right kind of eye, this...
The Carbonised Scroll That Read Itself
The date on it is older than the library it was buried with. On 25 June 2026, in a lecture room at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli Vittorio Emanuele III with Mount Vesuvius still rising in the distance, the Vesuvius Challenge presented the first Herculaneum papyrus...
The Ship at 3,008 Metres, and the 2026 Vote to Stop Going Back
There is a ship at the bottom of the Weddell Sea that has not been touched since the day it sank. Endurance, the three-masted barquentine in which Ernest Shackleton and twenty-seven men set out in 1914 to make the first land crossing of Antarctica, was found on 5...
The Fish With the Green Eyes, and the Century It Spent in a Jar
There is a fish that has been on the books since 1901 and has only just, this past July, been seen alive. It is about fifteen centimetres long, has no real neck to speak of, and its head is a transparent dome filled with fluid, inside which two tubular eyes point...
The Bell, the Sandbank, and a Three-Hundred-Year Argument
There is a bell in a conservation lab in Norfolk that is doing more historical work than most libraries. It was cast in 1681, hung in a Royal Navy frigate called Gloucester, lost with the ship on a Norfolk sandbank in the early hours of 6 May 1682, and found again,...
Walk, See, Learn: How You’d Actually Build a Humanoid in 2026
If you wanted to build a humanoid robot from scratch in 2026, the strangest thing about the project is how little of it would be invention. The actuators are catalog items. The simulation environments are open source. The base policies are downloadable. The...
The Furnace at Thornton, and the Iron in the Bog
There is a hole in the ground outside Thornton, in West Yorkshire, and what is interesting about it is mostly what is not there. The hole is the bottom of an iron-smelting furnace from the Late Iron Age, about 2,400 years old, dug in advance of a construction project...