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Researchers recalculated how much Mercury's radius has contracted over its history and found the planet has shrunk 10% to 30% more than earlier studies indicated. The updated figures come from reassessing surface features like fault scarps that record the planet's cooling and contraction over billions of years.
Stephanie Yuhas, an award-winning TV and film writer and producer, launched a pet-sitting side business called The Funny Sitter after industry disruptions from the pandemic, writers' strikes, and a personal divorce upended her entertainment career. The business grew through word-of-mouth referrals, and she eventually hired trusted staff to help expand operations. It now brings in about $5,000 monthly on average, with earnings surging to roughly $15,000 during the holiday season.
Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science, announced that as of 16 November the Open Science Framework will no longer accept new uploads of code, data or supplementary materials, though existing public files will remain online. Private files must be deleted or made public by users, or they will automatically become public after the deadline. Preregistration services and the platform's 14 preprint servers will continue operating unaffected.
A new speculative fiction piece from Nature Futures follows Melba, an employee managing the Lost Luggage Department at a nearly abandoned interstellar flight headquarters. The story details how travelers' bags are shrunk via molecular-reduction technology before space voyages, and how some end up misrouted for decades, eventually landing in Melba's basement office filled with stacks of miniaturized suitcases.
Google has signaled it will scale back certain search functionality for European users rather than fully comply with EU antitrust rules, aiming to sidestep potential fines. The company frames this as a response to regulatory demands it considers overly burdensome or conflicting with its business model.
Sixty years after its 1966 debut, Star Trek is being credited with popularizing several concepts that eventually became real-world technologies. Despite airing only three seasons before cancellation, the show grew into a massive media franchise with films, spinoffs and merchandise, and its speculative gadgets influenced generations of engineers and inventors.
Fast Company released its Best Workplaces for Innovators 2026 list, highlighting seven companies in the technology and science category chosen by its judges. Three of the seven winners are based in the Bay Area, underscoring the region's continued concentration of innovative employers.
Stefano Cataldi, a neuroscientist at Columbia University studying serotonin's role in cognition, is weighing whether to leave bench research entirely to focus on science policy work. He is a delegate for the United Auto Workers union representing postdocs and research scientists, and last year he founded SCOPE, a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory-backed program that teaches scientists about policy, communication and career resources.
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have identified a ten-sided cloud formation encircling Saturn's south pole, a counterpart to the long-known hexagon at the planet's north pole. The decagon, detailed in a new Science Advances study, has sides roughly 16,800 kilometers long and sits near a jet stream blowing close to 260 miles per hour, even though the shape itself drifts at less than 6 mph.
Researchers analyzed immune responses from over 150 non-human primates infected during a prolonged Shigella outbreak at a research facility, identifying specific bacterial molecules and antibody binding sites linked to protective immunity. The findings, published in Science Translational Medicine, pinpoint precise structural targets that could inform vaccine design against multiple Shigella strains.
Three 16-year-old students from Cork County, Ireland—Émer Hickey, Ciara Judge, and Sophie Healy-Thow—discovered that treating cereal seeds with rhizobia bacteria, normally associated with legumes, sped up germination by 50 percent and increased barley and oat yields by up to 70 percent. Their research, which began as a school geography project on global food shortages, earned them the top prize at the 2014 Google Science Fair.
Researchers examined a fragment of 'hiroshimaite,' fallout material from the 1945 Hiroshima atomic bombing, and identified a previously unknown alloy composed of seven elements. The discovery, imaged via scanning electron microscope, was published in Science Advances ahead of the bombing's 81st anniversary.