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What lies beneath Fickle Hill in northern California? Maybe the answer to an earthquake mystery that has puzzled seismologists for decades. The origin of the 1954 magnitude 6.5 earthquake that rattled residents around Humboldt Bay has been unclear, but a new study now suggests a surprising source: the Cascadia subduction interface. In the Bulletin of…

A plucked guitar string can vibrate for seconds before falling silent. A playground swing, emptied of its passenger, will gradually come to rest. These are what physicists call “damped harmonic oscillators” and are well understood in terms of Newton’s laws of motion. But in the tiny world of atoms, things are strange — and operate…

Researchers at Rice University and collaborating institutions have discovered direct evidence of active flat electronic bands in a kagome superconductor. This breakthrough could pave the way for new methods to design quantum materials — including superconductors, topological insulators and spin-based electronics — that could power future electronics and computing technologies. The study, published in Nature…

Quantum networks are often described as the future of the internet — but instead of transmitting classical information in bits, they send quantum information carried by photons. These networks could enable ultra-secure communication, link together distant quantum computers into a single, vastly more powerful machine, and create precision sensing systems that can measure time or…

A newly-discovered species of a large, crocodile-relative predator has been described via a remarkably well-preserved fossil from Argentina, according to a study published August 27, 2025, in the open-access journal PLOS One by Fernando Novas from Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales “Bernardino Rivadavia,” Argentina, and colleagues. The Chorrillo Formation formed around 70 million years ago,…

A newly discovered, raccoon-sized armored monstersaurian from the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Southern Utah, United States, reveals a surprising diversity of large lizards at the pinnacle of the age of dinosaurs. Named for the goblin prince from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit,” the new species Bolg amondol also illuminates the sometimes-murky path that life traveled…

John Glenn during the fiery re-entry NASA/Andy Saunders ON 20 February 1962, NASA astronaut John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth, but there were signs of trouble. As Glenn’s Friendship 7 spacecraft returned from its historic flight, a warning light indicated its heat shield had unlatched, risking complete incineration. This image (above) captures…

The Dispossessed takes place on the twin worlds of Anarres and Urras Naeblys/Alamy There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared; an adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it…