The hidden demon-fish from beneath an arsenal
There is a fish, two centimetres long, eyeless, pink, and almost phosphorescently strange, that lives in a limestone aquifer beneath a US Army ammunition plant in northern Alabama. It was formally described for the first time in 2025, by a team led by a researcher at...
Bronze Age bling fell out of the sky
If you were a Mycenaean nobleman around 1500 BC and you wanted the most expensive ring on the Aegean, you would not have asked for gold. You would have asked for what was, materially, rarer: a ring whose iron had been beaten out of a meteorite. A team led by Eleni...
Can you keep a coral’s pump primed? Yes \u2014 for a few hours, with a motor
The new piece of coral biology, as a Quanta Magazine piece on Pacherres and Kühl’s May 2026 Science paper lays it out, is that the polyps are not passive. Across the surface of every polyp, cilia beat in coordinated hexagonal patches to spin up tiny vortices...
Corals run their own pumps \u2014 and the pumps overheat
A coral looks like a rock. It isn’t. It is, among other things, a small engineering project, and the engineer is a forest of hairs a few micrometers long that no one bothered to study closely until 2014. Every coral colony sits inside a thin sliver of seawater...
The Stones That Kept the Empire Upright
The Batavia did not die quietly, and it did not die alone. On the morning of 4 June 1629, the flagship of the Dutch East India Company’s outbound fleet drove onto Morning Reef in the Houtman Abrolhos archipelago, about sixty kilometres off the coast of what is...
Pompey Did Not Come the First Time
The young United States did not answer the Barbary corsairs with cannon. Not at first. It answered with money. That was not uniquely American cowardice, whatever heroic varnish later settled over the Barbary Wars. It was the going rate for passage through a...
Three straits, one squeeze, no Pompey
Three of the world’s most important oil corridors are being squeezed at the same time. That has not happened before in the modern era, and the structural fact is more interesting than any of the headlines. The Strait of Hormuz has been at what the trade press is...The Quantum Computer That Borrowed Anyons
The most expensive trick in a useful quantum computer may have just met a rival. In the standard playbook for fault-tolerant quantum computing, noisy physical qubits are assembled into cleaner logical ones. That is only the beginning. To perform arbitrary...