Under Huang's leadership, Nvidia clashed with environmental groups seeking to hold the company accountable for its so-called "hidden" emissions. Huang has talked up the idea of using AI to fight climate change while his company's supply chain emissions ballooned. Nvidia's investments, meanwhile, have support …
Coral reefs are dying from rising ocean temperatures. They lose their color and die. A serendipitous event in a Stanford lab may have given scientists a way to save them.
In a tank at the Hopkins Marine Station, a healthy coral fell onto a bleached one. — Read the rest
The ancient Maya loved using a bright red paint to decorate all sorts of things, from temple walls to pottery. Thousands of years after their civilization collapsed, we’re finding that their favorite shade of red contained mercury that poisoned their water and food supply.
According to a recent study published in Science Advances by Auburn University paleolimnologist Matthew Waters, it’s an environmental catastrophe of their own making. The Maya loved the color red. It held several sacred meanings, from representing blood to the Sun, among others.
To get that vibrant hue, they relied heavily on cinnabar, a bright red mineral that is highly toxic because it contains mercury sulfide. The funny thing is, Cinnabar does not naturally occur in the Yucatán Peninsula, where the Maya resided. They used a complex trade network to import the stuff that was poisoning them.
The Ancient Maya May Have Been Poisoning Themselves With Something They Considered Sacred
Over the centuries, rain washed paint runoff directly into water sources essential to the community, like Lago Coba and Cenote Xcach. When the mercury hit the lake bottom, bacteria transformed the runoff into lethal methylmercury.
When modern researchers pulled sediment cores from those lakes, they found mercury levels up to six times higher than today’s highest safety thresholds. All that mercury nuked the local aquatic ecosystem, killing the algae and freshwater shellfish the Maya relied on for protein.
Historians have debated for years whether climate change or war caused the Maya collapse during the Classic Period. Seems like we could also add in the casual drinking of toxic heavy metals.
With Hubble expected to reenter the atmosphere by 2034 and several malfunctions on board, NASA is asking commercial space companies for proposals on how to extend the telescope’s lifespan.
Between 2016 and 2018, a team of researchers at a dig site near Cambridge, England, found a mildly disturbing but archaeologically fascinating ditch filled with 8,000 ancient frog bones. Was it some ancient pagan ritual? Perhaps the bodies of some failed arcane experiment? The researchers were baffled and spent the past decade or so trying to figure out what 8,000 frog bones in a ditch in England could mean.
Now, scientists at Bournemouth University and the Museum of London Archaeology think they’ve figured out who put them there. To their surprise, it’s an animal that says hoo.
As reported by the BBC and detailed in the journal Environmental Archaeology, scientists say the bones are the remains of a frog buffet dined upon by short-eared owls and hen harriers who eat like kings during the Roman period.
Scientists Finally Solved the Mystery of 8,000 Ancient Frog Bones Found in a Ditch
By analyzing how the bones were broken and measuring the tiny upper-arm humerus bones, the researchers realized that hungry predatory birds devoured thousands of young frogs over a single winter.
The researchers say much of this was indirectly fueled by human activity. Local settlers had cleared much of the dense forest to graze their livestock, inadvertently stripping away the natural tree cover that protected local frog populations.
The defendant wetlands were retreating at the time, which was perfect for frog breeding, and even more perfect for hungry birds looking to snack on breeding frogs. The frogs were defenseless as they sat out in the open grassland. The birds gorged themselves on frogs, leaving thousands and thousands of their bones behind.
By the time they were done, the leg left behind a 46-foot ditch stuffed with 8,000 bones as evidence of their incredible feast. A meal so epic it baffled scientists nearly 2,000 years later.
There’s something behind Neptune. It’s a big object, and it seems to be orbiting the Sun in the opposite direction from everything else. Researchers have no idea what it is or where it came from, but one thing is certain: it’s weird.
According to data from EarthSky and the Rubin Observatory, this celestial weirdo goes by the temporary name R631. While Earth and everything else in the solar system orbit the Sun in a roughly flat pancake shape, this 62-mile-wide… Thing is cutting through the solar system at an extremely steep 142-degree angle, and all against the natural flow of the cosmos.
Scientists Just Discovered Something Very Strange Lurking Beyond Neptune
It makes no sense, especially given how our solar system formed billions of years ago. A massive cloud of dust flattened out and started spinning like a record. Everything born from that record started spinning in the same direction, and it’s been that way ever since. R631 just up and decided to spin the other way, actively ignoring the fundamental physics that everything else in our celestial neighborhood abides by.
This anomaly is currently sitting about 3 billion miles away and takes almost 548 years to make one full trip around our Sun. Since this rebel plays by its own rules, astronomers suspect it could be a massive comet, possibly from outside our solar system, that will start spewing gas when it makes its closest pass to the Sun in 2047.
Of course, the idea that it is from outside of our solar system is just one theory — that maybe it got kicked out of some neighboring star system and got sucked into our Sun’s gravity. The other option is that it was born and bred right here in our solar system but got flung into a reverse orbit after getting caught in a gravitational game of pinball with Neptune or Jupiter.
Researchers will keep a close eye on it for now, though we probably won’t learn much more about it for some time.
The SS Jeremiah O’Brien, a WWII ship/peptide party location. | Photo: Haus Fund
This isOptimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewerVictoria Songthat dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they're going to change your life. We'll be taking a break next week and will be back on November 25th. Opt in for Optimizer here.
The SS Jeremiah O'Brien is a World War II Liberty ship. The hulking vessel was built in 56 days. It made 11 trips to Normandy, France, to supply the Allied powers in the fight against German U-boats. Last week, it was the site of a black-tie peptide party thrown by a trio of Gen Z venture capitalists.
Roughly 150 people attended the event, where four types of …
“I woke up and checked the agents' reports. 'DAMN!' They had found lots of villages and other regular shapes that looked like structures or houses,“ Pietro Miotti wrote on his blog. | Image: Pietro Miotti
Armed with a team of AI agents, Google researcher Pietro Miotti claimed earlier this week to have discovered a potentially unmapped Maya site in Mexico. There was just one problem: The site had already been discovered and was published in an academic journal last year. The incident, which sparked criticism among archeologists online, underscores a growing tension in science as amateurs wielding increasingly powerful AI tools parachute into specialist fields, often without the expertise needed to understand what they are looking at.
Local communities are often already well aware of sites in their area.
Humanity has thrived thanks to a stable cryosphere, but burning fossil fuels has increased the risk of “accelerating and partly irreversible” harm to the planet’s cold places.
Creatine is everywhere right now. But are the claims around this classic supplement actually based in real science? Or are they just more marketing hype?
For decades, creatine has been sold to fitness buffs, as a way to build more muscle, faster. Now it’s being pitched to almost everyone, with influencers, podcasters, and celebrity doctors claiming it can sharpen your mind, lift your mood, offset sleep deprivation, and even reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. And these wellness claims are driving a real surge in profit — US sales topped half a billion dollars in 2025.
So what is creatine actually doing in your body? Will it really help you build muscle, or are those dramatic before-and-after photos telling a different story? And when it comes to your brain, is there real evidence behind the claims about memory, mood, and Alzheimer’s, or is the hype getting ahead of the science?
We dug into the research on creatine, from the muscles to the mind, and spoke with exercise scientist Nick Tiller and associate professor Matthew Taylor, whose team at the University of Kansas studied creatine’s effects on people with Alzheimer’s disease.
After its latest device struggled to perform, brain-computer interface startup Synchon halted clinical trials. The company says it will upgrade the implant’s hardware and is at work on a new device.
A graphic representing Google’s AlphaGenome Atlas. | Image: Google
Researchers at Google DeepMind have unveiled a new AI model designed to unravel how changes in our DNA affect different cells, giving scientists a more detailed view of a notoriously difficult problem that could hold important clues to the causes of disease - and point the way to new treatments.
AlphaGenome 2 is the successor to DeepMind's genome-predicting AI model AlphaGenome, which was released last year. While nearly every cell in the human body carries the same DNA, different types of cells - from heart muscle cells and skin cells to immune cells fighting an infection - switch different genes on and off, and those patterns can change d …
The idea that external forces are causing internal anxiety that manifests physically in your body isn’t exactly new. But a new study published in PNAS found that stress from the pandemic rapidly aged people at an epigenetic level, meaning they aged more quickly at a genetic level.
But it really affected only one group: young people, particularly teenagers.
Teens, with their still-forming brains, had such a hard time processing the traumas of not being able to go anywhere to protect the health and safety of themselves and those closest to them that the biological timers deep down in their DNA sped up.
Lead author Alicia Schowe and researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry analyzed saliva samples from over 1,000 German participants using four different epigenetic clocks. They tracked DNA methylation, the chemical tags along your genetic strands that regulate gene activity.
Pre- and post-lockdown data revealed that while physical health hits like weight gain and smoking bumped up aging metrics across the board, adolescents were the sole group whose subjective mental anguish directly turbocharged their biological clocks.
The Pandemic Did Some Real Damage to Teenagers
Puberty is already a dramatic mess of hormonal angst, but stripping away real-world social interaction made it all the worse on a biological level, leaving measurable genetic scars.
The broader Takeaway is one we knew before the pandemic, met face-to-face during it, and one many people refuse to acknowledge post-pandemic: large-scale societal crises hit vulnerable populations hardest. People already struggling in the lower socioeconomic strata or people with poor health suffered the worst epigenetic hits.
Scientists don’t yet know if this accelerated cellular aging leads to an earlier onset of age-related illnesses like cancer or diabetes. For now, keep an eye on your teenager and ask yourself: Are they acting like a divorced 45-year-old accountant more than usual? Because that might be the rapid biological aging at work.
1998 KY26 is an object in space, and it’s a very, very fast one. For some mysterious reason that no one can figure out yet, it’s getting faster. This happens with asteroids sometimes, but this one’s different. There might be some kind of propulsion source that’s moving this thing along.
In a study published in the journal Icarus, as reported by ScienceAlert, astronomers can’t make heads or tails of this weird, 36-foot-wide weirdo of a space rock, which spins on its axis every 5 ½ minutes and is currently about 186 million miles from Earth.
Cue the chorus of far-out theories, like from everyone’s favorite conspiratorial Harvard astronomer, Avi Loeb, who you might remember as the guy who believed Comet 3I/ATLAS could have been an ancient alien artifact. This time, Loeb isn’t reaching super deep into alien theories, as he suggests 1998 KY26 may be a dead Soviet spacecraft.
Loeb’s theories are always a bit fanciful. Best to stick with the prevailing scientific hypothesis that KY 26 is a “dark comet,” meaning it’s a sneaky comet with no tail that accelerates by outgassing water vapor into space, using its own melting as propulsion.
Good theory, right? Makes a lot of sense. There’s a ton of logic to it. Case closed.
Well, that theory just got blown up.
This Asteroid Is Speeding Up for Reasons Scientists Still Can’t Fully Explain
Georgia Tech aerospace engineers Korbin Hansen and Masatoshi Hirabayashi ran thermal 3D models on the comet to see if hidden ice could actually survive inside it. They found that KY26 is way too warm. For buried ice to hang around over long cosmic timescales, temperatures need to stay below a frosty -198°F.
Even the coldest spots on KY26 average around -53°F to -61°F. At those temperatures, any internal water reserve would have completely evaporated within 2,000 years. If that ice were powering its weird acceleration, the whole stash would burn up in 62 years.
So what’s actually pushing this asteroid off of its orbital path? It’s hard to say, but without going to sci-fi extremes, researchers suspect it could be good old-fashioned solar radiation pressure and thermal emission forces moving what is “likely a dehydrated asteroid” that has no water and hasn’t had any in a long time.
Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft is currently en route to catch up with the rogue rock, with a rendezvous scheduled for July 2031.
Southern Thailand once hosted a gigantic rodent. A 66-pound rodent once roamed Thailand about 33 to 35 million years ago, and we know this thanks to a gigantic tooth found in a coal mine back in 2004.
As detailed in Scientific Reports, a team of international researchers finally identified the species using two fossilized teeth dug up in Krabi province: a dark molar and a two-inch, cream-colored incisor that geologist Pannipa Tian originally thought was just a regular old bone. Instead, it belonged to Yakamys sirindhornae, a newly discovered member of the extinct Ischyromyidae family that breaks previous records for Paleogene-era rodents because of its chunkiness.
At 66 pounds, it was roughly the size of a modern beaver, making it about half as massive as today’s capybara. South America gets all the attention when it comes to the very specific claim of having mega-rodents; this discovery proves that giant rodents were already stomping around Asia millions of years before their South American cousins diversified.
Scientists Just Discovered a New Species of Giant Rodent, and It Was an Absolute Unit
You can infer a lot about a creature from its teeth alone, but we still don’t fully know what Yakamys sirindhornaelooked like or what it ate. The teeth were found in ancient lake sediment, which researchers speculate means it might’ve lived a relatively chill, semi-aquatic lakeside life.
On the other hand, it could also have been a gigantic jittery squirrel, for all we know.
We won’t find out more until paleontologists dig up some more of its remains and get a better look at this big, chunky beast of a rat-like creature that probably wouldn’t sneak away with a fallen New York City sidewalk pizza slice as much as it would just walk up to you and take it off your plate, daring you to do something about it.
A delivery robot rolls down a pedestrian walkway in Miami. | Photo: Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Serve Robotics is opening up its platform to make its autonomous last-mile delivery robots available to anyone who wants to use them. The company is launching a new AV Delivery Developer Portal, enabling third-party software engineers, independent businesses, and even autonomous AI agents to access its fleet of 2,000 sidewalk robots.
With this new capability, third-party developers and interested small businesses can use Serve's software tools to dispatch robots directly without relying on major food delivery companies, like Uber Eats. Now, anyone who lives in one of the 150 neighborhoods where the company currently operates can employ a si …
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