Science & Sustainability Correspondent
Lina translates complex research into stories of hope, covering climate solutions, medical advances, and biodiversity wins.
AI companies control the story: Reports from Anthropic and OpenAI only reflect what those companies choose to share, leaving researchers and policymakers making high-stakes decisions based on incomplete, self-serving data.A new independent platform helps fill the gap: The AI Observatory aggregated n...
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Air conditioning is making cities hotter, and that’s not incidental. Every AC unit pulls heat from inside a building and dumps it into the street, which raises outdoor temperatures, which makes more people reach for the thermostat.
Researchers have demonstrated a quantum computation that appears to exceed the practical capabilities of leading classical simulation methods while also addressing a longstanding problem: how to verify the result....
ALICE measurements suggest that gluons inside nuclei begin behaving collectively at very small scales, favoring gluon saturation over conventional nuclear shadowing alone....
In humans and many other animals, a mother's age can affect the physical and behavioral characteristics of the next generation. Scientists call these changes maternal age effects, and while they are widespread across the animal kingdom, researchers still don't fully understand how or why they occur....
Optical measurements can reveal the hidden collective motion and quantum dynamics of electrons inside a Wigner crystal....
Large-scale tidal observations challenge the textbook idea that two symmetric water bulges physically form on opposite sides of Earth....
High in the forests of western Thailand, scientists have discovered a tiny new lizard whose striking appearance and unique biology earned it a name worthy of a fantasy dragon....
In the 1990s, Barbara Sherwood Lollar descended into the Kidd Creek mine in northern Ontario, which cuts more than three kilometers into the ancient root of North America. There her team of geochemists found water that had been confined underground for more than a billion years. This ancient brine t...
Nearly 50 years after launch, NASA has found a clever way to stretch Voyager 2’s fading power supply and buy its science mission at least another year....
Islands are widely recognized as natural laboratories of evolution. The ocean restricts movement among islands, allowing isolated populations to adapt to different environments and, at times, diverge into new species. However, on large islands, geographic distance may restrict movement, while enviro...
A virus kills a bacterium, and in the wreckage, other microbes may find one of life's most essential nutrients: vitamin B12....
An ultrathin silicon surface can steer and reshape light in just 74 femtoseconds, opening a path toward a new generation of high-speed optical technology....
Inside a fusion machine, the plasma can reach temperatures hotter than the Sun’s core while powerful magnetic fields squeeze it into a tiny, unstable space. These extreme conditions are necessary for fusion, but they can also make the machine itself move in subtle ways. At the DIII-D National Fusion...
Bonnethead sharks start life with pointed heads, but females undergo a striking transformation as they mature, developing dramatically rounder snouts....
Physicists may have uncovered a hidden feature inside protons that helps preserve one of matter’s most fundamental properties. RHIC collision data suggest baryon number is carried not simply by three quarks, but by a Y-shaped junction of the gluons connecting them. The finding challenges a decades-o...
Some machines are so large that describing them as “vehicles” or “equipment” almost feels inadequate. They can stretch for hundreds of meters, weigh thousands of tonnes, or operate on a scale normally associated with entire industrial facilities. From a 14,196-tonne excavator that crawls through ope...
CT scans and DNA revealed that Australia’s rare sea muppets only look like seahorses and actually belong to a separate evolutionary lineage....
Signals need something to carry them—radio waves carry wireless data, light carries information through optical fibers, and sound carries information through air. As electronics become smaller and researchers explore new ways to process information, magnetic waves called magnons are attracting atten...
An international research team examined a unique fossil from China that, for the first time, preserves the digestive system of a marine reptile with a long neck that lived in the oceans 245 million years ago....