Science & Discovery
Breakthroughs and discoveries, explained with their real limits.
A nearly complete skull from north east China has been identified as a Denisovan, giving a face to a group known since 2010 only from fragments
For fifteen years the Denisovans were known from teeth, jaw pieces and fragments of bone, and nobody could say what one looked like. Ancient proteins and DNA have now identified a nearly complete skull from north east China, at least 146,000 years old, as one of them.
Rubin Observatory filed 20,000 candidate asteroid discoveries in a single night
On the night of 5 February 2026 the Vera C. Rubin Observatory filed about 20,000 candidate asteroid discoveries at once, drawn from roughly 246,000 observations. Its entire previous haul, across 1.6 years of test observing, was 12,700.
A bendable solar cell has reached 33.6 percent efficiency, closing in on rigid panels
A flexible perovskite-on-silicon cell hit 33.6 percent certified efficiency in the lab, far above the 20 to 25 percent of today's rigid rooftop panels.
CRISPR delivered a functional cure for severe sickle cell in 27 of 28 patients
In a peer-reviewed trial, 27 of 28 people with severe sickle cell disease had no pain crises after a single gene-editing treatment.
Quantum computers got much better at catching their own mistakes
A peer-reviewed result cut quantum computing errors by between 11 and 800 times using error-corrected logical qubits.
A fusion lab set a record, and quietly made ignition routine
The bigger news is not the record number. It is that a result once called impossible now happens again and again.
