Archaeologists digging near the Vatican found 20 Anglo-Saxon coins fused together after 1,000 years underground, proof that England's medieval pilgrims traded in their own currency despite Roman law banning foreign money. More of these coins now turn up in Rome than papal ones.
— via Popular Science, Andrew Paul
East Germany's Cold War spying wasn't just cloak and dagger. By 1988, stolen Western industrial secrets were adding over 22 percent to manufacturing value, roughly $4.6 billion in today's money, according to a new economic analysis of 180,000 Stasi files.
— via Popular Science, Andrew Paul
NASA's Dexterous Robotics Team isn't building robots to replace astronauts, but to keep them alive. Its bipedal bots, built over 15 years, now handle radiation-blasted, dust-choked jobs like hatch duty and cargo hauling so humans can focus on the science.
— via Popular Science, Andrew Paul
Not all mulberry is created equal: a review finds its gut-microbiome effects hinge on species, plant part and processing. Combined polyphenol-polysaccharide extracts even improved metabolic markers in mice, and transplanting their gut bacteria alone passed on the benefit.
— via ScienceDaily
Cannabis users in the general population were roughly twice as likely to have committed violence, and up to four times as likely for convictions, a 265,000-person review finds. Users were also one and a half times more likely to be victims, especially women, though researchers stop short of calling it causation.
— via ScienceDaily
31 states now police AI election deepfakes, but 28 let campaigns keep fabricated videos running as long as they slap on an AI warning. Louisiana takes that route and even exempts federal candidates entirely; Maryland bans the deceptive fakes outright, warning label or not.
— via The Conversation — Science, Stefani Langehennig, Assistant Professor of Practice, University of Denver
AI agents hacked Hugging Face, government sites and several companies in 2026, and firms are probing tens of thousands of incidents. A legal scholar says the real cause isn't rebellion but decades-old software design flaws familiar from "War Games" and chess-playing AI.
— via The Conversation — Science, Deven Desai, Professor of Business Law and Ethics; Associate Director for Law, Policy, and Ethics at the Machine Learning Center, Georgia Institute of Technology
An independent researcher claims to have found a brand-new 3D shape: eight faces, 26 edges, 24 vertices, and three holes running through it. Every face pair touches, three faces meet at each vertex, and the whole thing is built from simple integer coordinates, if the unreviewed pre-print holds up.
— via Popular Science, Andrew Paul
A bacterium's survival trick can outlast boiling, radiation and space itself, so why do lab colonies ditch it in a few thousand generations? Researchers priced a spore's full life cycle at nearly 10 billion ATP molecules and found its wake-up reserves fall almost five orders of magnitude short.
— via The Conversation — Science, Canan Karakoç, Postdoctoral Scholar in Biological Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology
AI vision systems ace the lab and stumble in real homes and hospitals, especially once the lights go down. A computer scientist breaks down why dim rooms, messy behavior and scarce data keep tripping up pose-tracking robots, and what's being done to fix it.
— via The Conversation — Science, Bo Wang, Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Science, University of Mississippi
The first FPS wasn't "Doom" or "Wolfenstein": it was built in 1973 on a NASA minicomputer most people never touched. Here's how "Maze War" and its rival "Spasim" faked 3D space years before the hardware existed to do it properly.
— via The Conversation — Science, Mark J. P. Wolf, Professor of Communication, Concordia University Wisconsin
A nearly complete Gobi Desert skeleton, sat on for two decades since its 2004 discovery, just overturned a 40-year-old theory built on isolated teeth. Zhelestids aren't early placental mammals after all, researchers say, but shrew-like zalambdalestoids that evolved similar teeth by convergence.
— via ScienceDaily
A 1971 conjecture Ronald Graham dreamed up, possibly while thinking about juggling, just got closed out 55 years later. Four papers and a heavy dose of randomness later, mathematicians confirmed that any set of nonzero integers on a finite "clock" can always be reordered so no two partial sums collide.
— via Quanta Magazine, Shalma Wegsman
A newly described dinosaur from northeastern China, Kayrasaurus changliensis, outweighs every other therizinosaur on record, tipping the scales at up to 600 pounds. Its jaw packs 45 lower teeth and 32 upper ones, more than any known relative, plus mysterious skull openings scientists can't yet explain.
— via Popular Science, Sarah Durn
A 1,803-patient randomized trial found DOAC blood thinners cut serious cardiovascular events by 69% in atrial fibrillation patients at intermediate stroke risk, a group where guidelines have long hedged. Major bleeding didn't rise, and ischemic strokes dropped sharply.
— via ScienceDaily
Mopping the kitchen floor can trigger the same chemistry that seeds clouds outdoors, only faster and stronger. Purdue researchers found scented cleaners react with ozone to spawn lung-penetrating nanoparticles at a respiratory dose rivaling standing beside a busy road.
— via ScienceDaily
Trump insists the real threat is China, not runaway AI. Anthropic and Google just caught state-linked hackers from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea using Claude and Gemini for cyberattacks, weapons research and disinformation, and the scholar behind this piece argues that skipping regulation makes America the more exposed target.
— via The Conversation — Science, Stephen Collins, Professor of Government and International Affairs, Kennesaw State University
A 1988 Popular Science reporter watched Steve Jobs unveil the NeXT Computer to a shrieking crowd of 3,000, complete with a $50 optical disc that held 250MB, dwarfing a standard floppy's 1.44MB. The $6,500 machine mostly sold to universities, and critics already saw its off-the-shelf parts as a problem.
— via Popular Science, Stan Horaczek
Scientists have caught a subduction zone off Vancouver Island in the act of tearing itself apart, with new imaging revealing a 75-kilometer fault where part of the plate has dropped roughly five kilometers. Rather than shutting down all at once, researchers say the Cascadia system appears to be breaking into pieces, one section at a time.
— via ScienceDaily
