ScienceOne Supernova, Five Times: SN Winny and the Hubble Tension
A six-year hunt for a one-in-a-million coincidence finally paid off. The same exploding star, repeated five times across the sky, may settle cosmology's loudest fight.
AuthorCasey Cooper
Topics & Discovery Editor
Casey Cooper is a curious generalist with degrees in both physics and history, a combination that reflects an unwillingness to pick just one interesting thing to study. After years in science communication and educational content development, Casey now focuses on exploring topics that deserve more depth than a Wikipedia summary. Every article is an excuse to learn something new and share it with others who value genuine understanding over quick takes. When not researching the next deep-dive topic, Casey is reading obscure history books, attempting to understand quantum mechanics (still), or explaining something fascinating to anyone who will listen.
Science CommunicationHistorical ResearchCross-Disciplinary SynthesisCultural AnalysisEnvironmental TopicsPhilosophy & Ideas
Science
ScienceFool's Gold Has Been Hiding Real Lithium This Whole Time
A West Virginia lab has found measurable lithium locked inside pyrite from Appalachian black shale, an unexpected source for the metal that runs the battery economy.
NatureThe First Real Skeleton of a Dinosaur-Killing Crocodile
A 31-foot crocodile that ambushed dinosaurs finally has an accurate full skeleton, forty years after the search for it began.
IdeasA Sound Wave Might Finally Find Consciousness
An MIT roadmap lays out how transcranial focused ultrasound, a tool that can reach deep brain tissue a millimeter at a time, could finally answer questions neuroscience has been unable to resolve for thirty years.
ScienceScientists Stretched a Liquid Until It Snapped Like Glass
A Drexel team pulled a simple viscous liquid until it broke with an audible crack. The result rewrites a textbook boundary between fluids and solids.
HistoryA Seal Tooth in a Cave Rewrites Ice Age Britain
A 15,000-year-old pendant misidentified for 160 years turns out to be from a grey seal, carried 100 kilometers inland. It changes what we know about Magdalenian Britain.
ScienceWhy a Pinch of Randomness Stops Robot Swarms Jamming
Harvard researchers found that robot swarms get stuck the way traffic does, and that adding noise unjams them. The math explains ant colonies and your commute.
ScienceDragonflies See a Red Humans Can't, and We Got There the Same Way
An Osaka team found dragonflies sensing light at 720 nanometers using the exact molecular trick mammals use for red vision, separated by 500 million years of evolution.
ScienceNeanderthals Hunted and Ate Outsiders. A Belgian Cave Holds the Proof.
A reanalysis of 41,000-year-old bones from Belgium's Goyet cave reveals that Neanderthals selectively butchered women and children from a rival group, the strongest evidence yet for inter-group warfare in our closest relatives.
ScienceA Hidden Drain in the Brain Rewrites 13 Years of Maps
Scientists just watched fluid crawl along an artery the brain should not have plumbed. The finding extends a discovery chain that began in 2012.
ScienceScientists Found the Protein That Ages Your Brain, and They Can Switch It Off
A UCSF team identified FTL1, the single protein most tied to cognitive decline in aging mice, then reversed memory loss by dialing it down.
NatureArctic Permafrost Is Melting Into Rivers, Releasing Carbon Frozen for Thousands of Years
A 44-year study of Alaska's North Slope reveals how thawing permafrost is flushing ancient dissolved carbon into Arctic rivers and reshaping coastal ecosystems.