Breakthroughs happen quietly. We make sure you hear about them.
2782 stories
Humans Made Fire 350,000 Years Earlier Than Previously Thought Groundbreaking discoveries in a field in Suffolk, England suggest that humans mastered the art of creating fire 400,000 years ago - almost 350,000 years earlier than previously known....
"Something that we've been trying to get a better handle on is how much of the carbon in the ocean is getting fixed," said Angelicque Santoro, a marine microbiologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "The numbers work out now, which is...
Scientists have long warned that rising global temperatures would force forest soils to leak more nitrogen gas into the air, further increasing both pollution and warming while robbing trees of an essential growth factor. However, a new study challen...
Based on a comprehensive study, researchers are now convinced the shafts were human-made, likely dug during the Late Neolithic period roughly 4,000 years ago :focal(689x384:690x385)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_pu...
Stardust Solutions' Ambitious Geoengineering Plan Stardust Solutions, an Israel-based geoengineering startup, believes it can solve climate change - for a price. The company has said it expects nations will soon pay it more than a billion dollar...
Join 50,000+ readers who receive our daily digest of the most uplifting stories from around the world.
Restoring Energy by Supplying Fresh Mitochondria Biomedical researchers at Texas A&M University report that they may have identified a way to slow or even reverse the loss of cellular energy production — a possibility that could influence many a...
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center reports that a geomagnetic storm on December 9 could make the aurora borealis, or northern lights, visible in parts of the United States. Folks living in Alaska and...
Picture a scientist with a provocative hypothesis — something that defies conventional wisdom or verges on the outlandish. Supporting the pursuit of that big, bold claim is the goal of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science's new Extraordinary...
Galaxy clusters are the most massive objects in the universe held together by gravity, containing up to several thousand individual galaxies and huge reservoirs of superheated, X-ray-emitting gas. The mass of this hot gas is typically about five time...
In March, NASA researchers employed a new camera system to capture data imagery of the interaction between Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost Mission-1 lander's engine plumes and the lunar surface. Through NASA's Artemis campaign, this data will help resea...
Brightcast is dedicated to restoring faith in humanity by highlighting the progress, solutions, and kindness that often go unnoticed. We believe in a balanced worldview.
Read our full mission →
NASA is helping shape the future of urban air travel with a new simulation that will manage how electric air taxis and drones can successfully operate within busy areas. The demonstration, held at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon V...
AI-powered 'Conversation Isolating' Headphones People often struggle to focus on a single conversation in noisy, crowded rooms filled with overlapping chatter. This challenge can be especially overwhelming for those with hearing difficulties. Re...
Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine say that hydrogen sulfide, the chemical behind that telltale rotten-egg smell of flatulence, might help protect the aging brain from cognitive decline, including Alzheimer's disease. While the idea of your body ...
An Ancient Sense With Deep Psychological Impact Researchers are uncovering how temperature influences the way we perceive our own bodies, offering new insight into the "skin-to-brain" signals that shape bodily awareness. This growing understandi...
"Quantum Antenna" Breaks Barrier in Measuring Elusive Terahertz Signals Breakthrough in Terahertz Frequency Comb Measurement A research team from the Faculty of Physics and the Centre for Quantum Optical Technologies at the Centre of New Techn...
Know someone who needs a boost? Share Brightcast with your friends and family.
AI Chatbots Mimic Human Social Networking Behavior As AI becomes more integrated into our daily lives, understanding how these systems navigate social interactions is crucial. A new study suggests that AI models like GPT-4, Claude, and Llama exhi...
This Surprising Discovery Rewrites the Milky Way's Origin Story Published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a new study examines the origin of a long-standing mystery within the Milky Way: two clearly defined groups of stars...
New Designs for Notre-Dame Windows Displayed, Swedish Climate Activists Acquitted for Smearing Paint on Monet Artwork, and More: Morning Links for December 9, 2025 Notre Dame's New Colors Despite heated controversy over a proposal to replace...
Michelle Hoehn is a cost accountant at NASA's Stennis Space Center, where her work contributes to NASA's Artemis program that will send astronauts to the Moon to prepare for future human exploration of Mars. As a seventh grader, the Bogalusa, Louisi...
Demand for electricity is increasing, and the U.S. electric grid will need to expand in response. However, a new study has found a tradeoff between cost, emissions, and reliability when it comes to grid expansion strategies. The study analyzed two p...
Download the Brightcast app for a better reading experience, daily notifications, and offline access.
Download App
Extreme mass-ratio inspirals Researchers have created a fully relativistic model showing that gravitational waves might carry hidden clues about dark matter near massive black holes. The study examines extreme mass-ratio inspirals, or EMRIs: sy...
Ten years after the first detection of gravitational waves from two merging black holes, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration, which includes Columbia University astronomer Maximiliano Isi, has captured a remarkably similar event with far greater detai...
Why do neurons die in dementia, and can this process be slowed down? A research group led by Prof. Marcus Conrad, Director of the Institute of Metabolism and Cell Death at Helmholtz Munich and Chair of Translational Redox Biology at the Technical Uni...
People often say that good journalism requires a 30,000-foot view. However, Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler has found the opposite to be true. The stories that move the world rarely start in boardrooms or at summits; they start with someone stand...
Supermassive Black Hole Unleashes Powerful Winds A supermassive black hole about 130 million light-years from Earth has been observed unleashing powerful winds, flinging material out into space at an astonishing 37,282 miles per second - over one...
Join 50,000+ readers who receive our daily digest of the most uplifting stories from around the world.
NASA astronaut Jonny Kim returned to Earth on Tuesday alongside Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky, wrapping up an eight-month science mission aboard the International Space Station to benefit life on Earth and future space exp...
The Sterile Neutrino Hypothesis Neutrinos are extremely small subatomic particles that interact so weakly with matter that they can move straight through entire planets. According to the Standard Model, which serves as the central framework of p...
Capturing Accretion Physics Without Approximations Using cutting-edge algorithms and exascale supercomputers, researchers have created the most detailed model so far of how luminous black holes pull in surrounding matter. For the first time, the...
Searching for an Atmosphere "The basic thesis for TRAPPIST-1e is this: If it has an atmosphere, it's habitable," said Sukrit Ranjan, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. "But right now, the first-...
The recent deaths of two white dwarf stars are challenging our understanding of both novae and the powerful physics underlying star death. According to astronomer John Monnier, the initial analysis of these often dramatic novae offers an "extraordina...
Brightcast is dedicated to restoring faith in humanity by highlighting the progress, solutions, and kindness that often go unnoticed. We believe in a balanced worldview.
Read our full mission →
Inside every human cell, an extraordinary feat of molecular organization takes place. Roughly six feet of DNA has to be packed into a nucleus that is only about one-tenth the width of a human hair, yet the DNA must remain accessible enough to carry o...
A study published in the scientific journal Communications Earth & Environment proposes that volcanic activity may have contributed to the rapid movement of the Black Death across medieval Europe. According to the researchers, cooling associated wi...
For more than a decade, cosmology has been stuck with a puzzling contradiction. Two of the most trusted ways of measuring the universe's expansion give two different answers. One set of measurements, based on nearby stars and exploding supernovas, ...
Ancient 'Dirty Dishes' May Have Led Archaeologists Astray for Decades Olive oil has been a kitchen staple for around 8,000 years, so archaeologists often report finding olive oil residue on excavated pottery. However, a new study published in the...
One of the most powerful volcanic events of the past 10,000 years occurred on the Greek island of Thera (Santorini) in the Aegean Sea. Researchers have long debated whether this eruption took place in the late 17th or 16th century BCE. Ash from the e...
Know someone who needs a boost? Share Brightcast with your friends and family.
Fever, aching limbs, and a runny nose—as winter returns, so too does the flu. The disease is triggered by influenza viruses, which enter our body through droplets and then infect cells. Researchers from Switzerland and Japan have now investigated th...
Researchers from the University of Vienna have observed the melting process of ultra-thin materials in unprecedented detail. Their findings not only challenge existing beliefs about the process but could also advance our understanding of phase transi...
Earth's Early Oceans Hid the Secret Rise of Complex Life New findings suggest that complex life began forming much earlier, and over a far longer period, than researchers previously understood. The study provides fresh insight into the environmen...
29 People Share Things That Are 'Technically True' And You Can't Argue With This Logic Fans of horror stories and video games are bound to know American writer, H. P. Lovecraft, as his name is pretty much on everything these days: Lovecraftian-th...
What can mapped drainage systems on Mars teach scientists about the red planet's watery past? A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences aims to address this by mapping Martian river basins for the first time. ...