Science

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Sep 28, 20261

The 1841 Aurora That 'Delayed a Train' Never Did — the Real First Case Is 1847

An international team has debunked the claim that space weather delayed a train in Exeter in 1841 — the railway line there did not open until 1846. The likely event was an auroral storm on 18 October 1848, which leaves the Midland Railway telegraph disruption of March 1847 as the earliest known space-weather impact on technology.

Mathematicians Crack a 55-Year-Old Conjecture With Randomness — and a Nod to Juggling

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Sep 28, 20261

Mathematicians Crack a 55-Year-Old Conjecture With Randomness — and a Nod to Juggling

Ronald Graham's 1971 rearrangement conjecture, possibly inspired by juggling, has been proved across four papers, the last by Lisa Sauermann and Huy Tuan Pham in February 2026. The tools were probabilistic: random orderings plus anti-concentration estimates built on Fourier analysis.

First Laser Power Link Between Two Free-Flying Spacecraft Set for Launch This Week

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Sep 28, 20261

First Laser Power Link Between Two Free-Flying Spacecraft Set for Launch This Week

Star Catcher's Protostar prototype launches on a SpaceX rocket this week to beam laser power to a free-flying cubesat — a first between two separate spacecraft. The company has $65M raised, 10 power purchase agreements and a ground record above 1 kilowatt.

Enceladus Plumes Pre-Sort Their Cargo — Making Alien Life Easier to Detect

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Sep 28, 20264

Enceladus Plumes Pre-Sort Their Cargo — Making Alien Life Easier to Detect

Two new Science Advances papers show that Enceladus's ice jets freeze slowly, concentrating single substances into individual grains, and that an earthly methane-producing microbe grows under simulated Enceladus ocean chemistry — despite a pH that should have stopped it.

DirectHop: A One-Gram Robot That Jumps to Whatever Height You Specify, Within a Centimetre

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Sep 28, 20263

DirectHop: A One-Gram Robot That Jumps to Whatever Height You Specify, Within a Centimetre

University of Washington engineers built a 1-gram hopping robot with no springs: a tiny motor spools a fishing line up a tower to launch it, current sets the height to within a centimetre, and it rights itself after landing 90 percent of the time.

China's Power Demand Tops One Petawatt-Hour in a Single Month for the First Time

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Sep 28, 20263

China's Power Demand Tops One Petawatt-Hour in a Single Month for the First Time

China consumed more than one petawatt-hour of electricity in a single month for the first time: 1.0332 PWh in August, up 1.7 percent year on year. Industry and services drove the record, while household demand fell 4 percent on wetter weather.

Germany's Solar Output Beats All of Last Year — With Three Months to Spare

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Sep 28, 20263

Germany's Solar Output Beats All of Last Year — With Three Months to Spare

By September 27, Germany had generated 90.2 terawatt-hours of solar power — more than in all of 2025 (90 TWh). BSW-Solar credits unusually sunny hours and continued PV expansion, but warns that the planned 2027 EEG amendment and grid package would hit small systems under 25 kilowatts.

First New Sea Spider Species in Nearly a Century Found in the Salish Sea

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Sep 28, 20264

First New Sea Spider Species in Nearly a Century Found in the Salish Sea

University of British Columbia researchers have described two new sea spider species - Callipallene pilosuspedes and Tanystylum kiixin - collected on scuba dives in the Salish Sea off British Columbia. They are the first new species named there in nearly a century.

Starship Flight 14: SpaceX Goes for Orbit - and a 10-Hour Satellite Run

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Sep 28, 20264

Starship Flight 14: SpaceX Goes for Orbit - and a 10-Hour Satellite Run

SpaceX targeted an 8:15 a.m. ET liftoff from Starbase, Texas, on September 28 for Starship's first attempt to reach orbit. The 14th flight is meant to circle Earth six times over roughly 10 hours and deploy 26 Starlink V3 satellites before splashing down in the Pacific.

JWST Finds Early Galaxies Were Already Seeding the Cosmos With Heavy Elements 500 Million Years After the Big Bang

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Sep 27, 20263

JWST Finds Early Galaxies Were Already Seeding the Cosmos With Heavy Elements 500 Million Years After the Big Bang

A Nature Astronomy study led by the University of Arizona found blueshifted absorption lines from oxygen, carbon and silicon in three galaxies at redshifts 7.2–9.3, evidence of galactic winds enriching intergalactic space before the midpoint of reionization — and a clue to why the first stars are so hard to find.

World's Factory Floors Pass 5 Million Industrial Robots as Asia Pulls Ahead

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Sep 27, 20263

World's Factory Floors Pass 5 Million Industrial Robots as Asia Pulls Ahead

IFR's World Robotics 2026 report records a 9% jump in the global robot stock to a record 5 million units, with more than 600,000 new installations in 2025 — 59% of them in China. The US overtook Japan, while Germany's installations fell 8%.

IonQ Runs Quantum Error Correction in Real Time on a Single CPU

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Sep 27, 20264

IonQ Runs Quantum Error Correction in Real Time on a Single CPU

IonQ says it demonstrated the first end-to-end real-time quantum error-correction decoder on an ordinary CPU, handling 408 simulated logical qubits across 31.5 million operations with almost no slowdown — an engineering step toward practical fault-tolerant machines, though still a simulation.