News
March 31, 2026
Thawing permafrost becomes 25 to 100 times more permeable, experiments find. Experiments by University of Leeds researchers, published in Earth's Future, have shown that thawing of permafrost makes it between 25 and 100 times more permeable, allowing more climate change forcing gases to escape.
March 30, 2026
AI writes a research paper that passes peer review. To date, the main role of AI in scientific research has been to assist with narrow tasks such as discovering chemical structures, analyzing data or predicting protein shapes. But now, the technology has broken new ground with a fully AI-generated paper passing peer review at a major machine-learning conference workshop.
March 29, 2026
Japan's giant caldera volcano is refilling 7,300 years later. The magma reservoir of the largest volcanic eruption of the Holocene is refilling.
Match 25. 2026
NASA Unveils Initiatives to Achieve America’s National Space Policy. As part of its “Ignition” event on Tuesday, NASA announced a series of transformative agencywide initiatives designed to achieve President Donald J. Trump’s National Space Policy and advance American leadership in space. These actions reflect the urgency of the moment, but also the tremendous opportunity ahead for world-changing science and discovery.
March 12, 2026
The world produced roughly 106 million barrels of oil per day in 2025, according to estimates from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Just two regions dominate global supply. North America and the Middle East together produce nearly 60% of the world’s oil, underscoring their outsized influence on energy markets.
This graphic breaks down global oil production by region in 2025, based on EIA data.
March 12, 2026
A Most Unusual Lake. Scientists estimate that Earth is home to more than 100 million lakes. Among the most unusual is Lake Unter-See, one of Antarctica’s largest and deepest surface lakes, known for its distinctive water chemistry. Its ice-covered waters have exceptionally high levels of dissolved oxygen, low dissolved carbon dioxide, and a strongly alkaline (basic) pH.
February 17, 2026
Russia plans to abandon lithium imports by 2028. According to Oleg Kazanov, head of Rosnedra, Russia expects to fully meet its lithium needs through domestic resources by 2028.
His statement, made during a speech in the State Duma, also indicates that by 2030 the country will be able to significantly reduce its dependence on supplies of several other rare and rare‑earth metals, including tantalum and niobium. This was reported by Kommersant.
February 17, 2026
Antarctica sits above Earth's strongest 'gravity hole.' Now we know how it got that way. Gravity feels reliable—stable and consistent enough to count on. But reality is far stranger than our intuition. In truth, the strength of gravity varies over Earth's surface. And it is weakest beneath the frozen continent of Antarctica after accounting for Earth's rotation.
An invisible force shaping Antarctica
January 27, 2026
Scientists from the Siberian Federal University have proposed an environmentally friendly technology to enhance oil recovery from hard-to-recover reservoirs. The development is based on a combination of xanthan gum, a natural biodegradable polymer, and nanoparticles. According to Vladimir Prigozhikh, a researcher at the Laboratory of Physical and Chemical Technologies for the Development of Hard-to-Recover Hydrocarbon Reserves, this composition can replace traditional synthetic solutions that persist in the environment for decades.
January 23, 2026
After Trump’s Ultimatum, Greenland Talks Include Sovereign U.S. Bases, No Drilling for Russia. Negotiators have discussed proposals to check Russian and Chinese influence in the Arctic and transfer sovereignty over pockets of Greenlandic land to the United States, an idea opposed by Denmark.
Discussions to resolve the future of Greenland have focused in recent days on proposals to increase NATO’s presence in the Arctic, give America a sovereign claim to pockets of Greenland’s territory and block potentially hostile adversaries from mining the island’s minerals.