Science

TLDR: What killed 40 people in under two minutes wasn't the New Year's pyrotechnics—it was the foam ceiling they ignited. The same lethal combination has killed hundreds before, exposing how checkbox enforcement turns known fire hazards into death sentences. You've held a sparkler. That fizzy little firework that makes birthday cakes glow. Harmless fun, right? read more

TLDR: Champagne sparklers ignited a foam ceiling in a Swiss bar, unleashing a flashover that killed 40 in 10 seconds—a preventable tragedy that keeps repeating because nightlife economics prioritize aesthetics over fire safety standards proven for decades. How physics and party culture collided in a basement bar, turning celebration into a 10-second inferno Picture this: read more

TLDR: A photographer discovered 20,000 dinosaur footprints marching up a vertical Picture a nearly vertical cliff face in the Italian Alps, 2,000 meters above sea level. Your neck cranes back. Thousands of dinosaur footprints march upward across the rock as if gravity took a holiday 210 million years ago. Wait, what? This isn't evolutionary gymnastics. read more

TLDR: In late November 2025, Hayli Gubbi—a little-known shield volcano in Ethiopia’s Afar Depression—erupted explosively for the first time in at least 10–12,000 years, hurling ash and sulfur up to ~15 km into the atmosphere and disrupting flights as far away as India, even though ground-level air there stayed mostly clean. This “quiet” volcano turned read more

TLDR: New 2025 data from the world’s largest sleep study shows you can—and often do—dream in the deepest, slow-wave stages of non-REM sleep, overturning the long-held “REM-only” rule and hinting that these quiet nightmares are both emotional rehearsals and potential early-warning signals for accelerated aging, dementia risk, and mental-health decline. You know the feeling. You read more

TLDR: A Mississippi highway crash that freed 21 lab-bound rhesus macaques offers a rare look inside the hidden, high-stakes world of trucking research primates across America—where $10,000 animals ride in climate-controlled trucks because airlines quit the business, federal rules aim to prevent exactly this chaos, and every mile balances biomedical necessity against the stress of read more

TLDR: University of Washington researchers report in Nature Chemical Biology (Oct. 9, 2025) that they’ve built therapeutic proteins carrying logic circuits—AND/OR gates—that act only on cells passing a preset molecular checklist, promising far safer cancer and autoimmune treatments. The proteins’ “smart tail” folds when it meets two confirming biomarkers, flipping a molecular switch that delivers read more