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10 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: September 27, 2026.
Cassini data show plume droplets freeze slowly and shatter, concentrating salts and organics into separate ice grains, and a second study found a methane-making microbe thriving in simulated Enceladus seawater.
Using Pliny the Younger's eyewitness account of Vesuvius as a benchmark, Berkeley researchers sharpened argon-argon dating to 0.4% accuracy and halved the uncertainty on potassium-40's half-life.
An Intuitive Machines image specialist spotted the fresh scar on Oct. 24, 2025, and 'dropped everything.' The blast churned the surface over 66 miles and left a 4-mile cold spot. The IAU has named it McGetchin.
The first stellar occultation ever planned and observed with JWST shows Chariklo's inner ring getting denser while its outer ring thins out. Rings around small bodies were supposed to be stable.
Tulane researchers found that vesper bats have two separate sets of immunoglobulin heavy-chain genes, an arrangement never before documented in a mammal. It may be part of why bats host viruses that would kill us without getting sick themselves.
A team including Roger Penrose held one branch of a rubidium atom's wavefunction against gravity and dropped the other. The phase shift when they recombined matched the equivalence principle.
More than 100 specimens dated to 567 million years ago include six groups never before found in North America, and evidence that early animals moved, reproduced sexually and built recognizable body plans earlier than thought.
Inside fallout debris from the 1945 atomic blast, researchers found a silicon-rich iron alloy with an atomic order never seen in any industrial material — condensed from vapor and frozen in the expanding fireball.
A University of Pittsburgh team showed the direction of turbulent energy transfer can be flipped, challenging Kolmogorov's 1941 theory and opening the door to steering ocean currents and microfluidic devices.
Two new studies using real-world ocean data find that earlier climate models underestimated AMOC weakening by 60 percent, raising collapse probability above 50% and threatening catastrophic consequences for Europe, Africa, and the U.S. East Coast.