Science

Science • May 18

Physicists Spent Years Hunting the “Ghost” Haunting the World’s Most Famous Particle Accelerator, and They Finally Found It

For decades, something invisible has been quietly undermining experiments inside one of the world's most important particle accelerators at CERN.

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Science • May 18

Scientists Keep Finding Major Discoveries Lurking in Museum Backrooms

Museums are among the most expansive resources humans have created.

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Science • May 18

Access to NOAA’s world-renowned Mauna Loa Observatory restored

More than three years after lava from Hawaii's erupting Mauna Loa volcano buried a mile of the road leading to NOAA's Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline...

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Science • May 18

Scientists Created a Subatomic Particle That Defies Our Understanding of Physics

The eta prime meson held together without one of the fundamental forces of the universe.

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Science • May 18

An asteroid discovered days ago will narrowly miss Earth

An asteroid named 2026JH2 will swing by Earth on Monday, passing four times closer than our distance to the moon.

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Science • May 18

SpaceX has launched more rockets in the past four years than the Soviet Union launched during the entire Space Race, and the cost per kilogram to low Earth orbit has dropped about 95% since 2010 — which has quietly rewritten the economics of every spac

In 2024, a single American company launched 134 orbital rockets. In 2025, that company is on track to launch around 170. The company is SpaceX.

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Science • May 18

Albert Einstein Speaking to His Son in 1900: "Life Is Like Riding a Bicycle. To Keep Your Balance, You Must Keep Moving"

He wrote it to a son he was losing. Decades later, Einstein's most famous quote means something entirely different than most people realize.

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Science • May 18

The US space enterprise is desperately waiting for Starship—will it finally deliver?

This is such a wild ride. The highs are high. The lows are low."

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Science • May 18

Polygenic risk scores are not genetic predispositions

Nature Human Behaviour (2026) Cite this article. You have full access to this article via your institution. Download PDF.

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Science • May 18

Dark matter in gravitational waves: what physicists have discovered

Physicists have detected a possible trace of dark matter in gravitational wave data. What does the GW190728 signal mean, and why is it important?

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Science • May 18

SpaceX Starlink and other satellite megaconstellations are creating an 'unregulated geoengineering experiment', scientists say

The space industry's plans to launch millions of satellites worry scientists as the rise in high-altitude air pollution threatens to alter Earth's climate.

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Science • May 18

'Truly significant': James Webb telescope reveals largest-ever map of the universe's hidden megastructures

Astronomers have reconstructed the "skeleton" of the cosmos in unprecedented detail, thanks to the largest-ever survey conducted by the James Webb Space...

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Science • May 18

The four astronauts who flew farther from Earth than any humans in history have just come back. The advice they're giving the rest of us has almost nothing to do with space.

On 10 April 2026, four astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, completing a nearly ten-day flight that had taken them...

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Science • May 18

Voyager 1's signal now takes more than 23 hours to reach Earth, and by the time NASA receives the next status check the spacecraft will already be 1.5 million kilometres further into interstellar space

By the time NASA receives Voyager 1's next status check, the spacecraft has already moved more than 1.4 million kilometres further into interstellar space.

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Science • May 18

Scientists think they’ve cracked the mystery of human right-handedness

A new study suggests humans became overwhelmingly right-handed because of two major evolutionary shifts: walking on two legs and developing much larger...

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Science • May 18

Venus and a razor-thin moon steal the show after sunset tonight

Don't miss Venus and the crescent moon create a striking twilight pairing in the western sky on May 18.

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Science • May 18

Watch an asteroid the size of a blue whale hurtle towards Earth live online TODAY

Watch a newly discovered asteroid pass just 0.237% of the Earth-moon distance from our planet on May 18, with this livestream.

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Science • May 18

The Galileo spacecraft was deliberately crashed into Jupiter in 2003 because mission planners feared a drifting probe could contaminate Europa's hidden ocean, forcing engineers to destroy the machine that revealed why Europa had to be protected

On September 21, 2003, NASA deliberately steered the Galileo spacecraft into Jupiter at 108000 miles per hour to keep its plutonium-powered hull from ever...

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Science • May 18

The Soviet Venera probes are still sitting on the surface of Venus, slowly being crushed and corroded by 900-degree sulfuric acid clouds, and the photographs they sent back in 1975 remain the only images humans have ever taken from the surface of another

The Soviet Venera landers that photographed the surface of Venus between 1975 and 1982 are almost certainly still there, deformed but recognisable,...

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Science • May 18

Back-to-Back Launches at Vandenberg: SpaceX Starlink Mission and Minuteman III Test

The U.S. Space Force has cleared two overnight-to-morning launch operations at Vandenberg this week: a SpaceX Falcon 9 carrying 24 Starlink satellites on...

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