Science
10 stories in this section · live from GNews.

Quantum Computers Just Passed a Test That Classical Computers Fundamentally Can't
Quantum computers are supposed to have abilities far beyond conventional ones, but verifying that they actually do is surprisingly difficult – because checking their results can itself require computations that become prohibitively difficult for classical machines.

A B-52 tore apart over North Carolina in January 1961 and dropped two hydrogen bombs, and Sandia's own accident reports, released in 2021, record that one bomb powered itself up, ran its timer out and
Two February 1961 Sandia Corporation reports, released under a Freedom of Information Act request in 2021, one for the first time and the other with far less blacked out, walk through the wreckage component by component. On the bomb whose parachute opened, the batteries fired, the barometric switch closed, the timer ran its cycle out and the nose crushed on impact. Two switches had never been moved, and the second stayed safe only because the first did.

Asteroid 2026 RW1 impacts Earth over Indian Ocean about 7 hours after discovery, becomes 13th known asteroid detected before impact
Asteroid 2026 RW1 — the 13th predicted Earth impactor — entered Earth’s atmosphere over the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia at 16:07 UTC on September 6…

Sea otters along California's central coast that habitually use rocks to crack open snails and mussels show measurably less tooth damage than otters that bite prey directly, a difference biologists do
A 2024 study in Science tracking 196 radio-tagged southern sea otters in Monterey Bay found that individuals who reliably use stone anvils to crack shellfish suffer measurably less tooth damage than otters that bite prey directly — a difference that keeps them alive when their preferred prey disappears.

California researchers find way to pinpoint major earthquake hotspots
UC Riverside scientists say a new approach using GPS strain data can identify the most likely locations of the world’s largest earthquakes along major fault lines.

'This Can't Be Correct': Arctic Rivers Are Breaking The Rules of Erosion
"We literally expected to see the opposite."

Scientists say they can now predict where an earthquake will strike next
Scientists at the University of California-Riverside have developed a way to identify where the biggest earthquakes are likely to occur. UC Riverside researchers say that their methodology identifies ...

In 2021, NASA grew Hatch chile peppers aboard the ISS for 137 days; four plants in the Advanced Plant Habitat yielded 26 peppers, and the stems holding flower to fruit grew straight instead of curved
Weightlessness doesn't just change how astronauts move—it rewires how plants grow, forcing botanists to rethink agriculture's fundamentals for space.

Through her estate, poet Jane Mead donated the 1,318-acre Mead Ranch above Napa Valley, knitting a wildlife corridor beside the 2,300-acre Walt Ranch and the 1,380-acre Sutro Preserve
A poet's final gift connects protected lands into a sprawling wildlife corridor, transforming fragmented hillsides into a landscape where animals can roam unbroken for miles.

Scientists found an estimated 5.5 million wild bees living beneath a New York cemetery — millions of solitary insects packed into underground burrows across just 1.5 acres, creating one of the largest
A shortcut through a graveyard revealed millions of bees living invisibly beneath New York soil—a discovery that rewrites what scientists thought possible about solitary insect colonies.
