Author: Sam Allcock

Two years ahead of schedule, a group of volunteers planted the final sapling on a hillside in the Baldwin Valley on the Isle of Man. By the standards of environmental announcements, it was a quiet moment with just muddy boots, a spade, and a hole in the ground—no ribbon cutting, no set piece for a press conference. However, Graham Makepeace-Warne of the Manx Wildlife Trust, who has been observing the development of this project since the land at Creg y Cowin was acquired in 2023, appeared to recognize its significance. Thirty thousand trees. For three years. An area of about…

A protein in the retina of a European robin, a small, unremarkable bird that can be found throughout much of the continent, is performing a function that took physicists decades to even mathematically describe. Cryptochrome 4 is the name of the protein. Electrons move when light strikes it. Additionally, the bird learns the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field from the motion of those electrons during the brief, nearly impossible window before quantum coherence collapses. It doesn’t refer to a map. It lacks a compass in the traditional sense. It has eyes that, in some way, perceive magnetism, and it…

Imagine a snorkeler, face down in warm blue water, being towed slowly behind a research vessel off the coast of Queensland while it counts coral. The scientist is mentally cataloguing decades of damage, calculating bleaching percentages, and recording the presence or absence of things that shouldn’t be missing. It sounds almost meditative. This is how the Australian Institute of Marine Science maintains its long-term surveillance of the Great Barrier Reef. In 2022, this surveillance yielded something truly unexpected: the highest coral cover across two-thirds of the reef in more than 36 years. Following the heatwaves, bleaching, and starfish outbreaks, the…

Carbon capture has been prominently featured in almost every major oil and gas conference over the past ten years. It can be seen in the glossy brochures placed near the entrance, in the panel discussions, and in the cautious optimism of executives who explain why fossil fuels and a livable planet are not inherently incompatible. Because science will eventually clean up the exhaust, the technology has operated as a sort of permission slip: keep drilling, burning, and operating the machinery. The Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University has released a new report that makes it much…

When virologists get together, a certain kind of dread that doesn’t make headlines on slow news days is carried by public health scientists in silence. For years, H5N1 has endured that fear. However, something changed in early 2024, and even researchers who typically use measured, cautious language are now using words they hardly ever use. Dairy cows contracted the virus. Even though it seems simple, that one sentence changed a lot of presumptions. Cattle were just not taken seriously in the influenza narrative for many years. Indeed, cows have been identified as carriers of that more subdued relative, influenza D.…

Last October, Mark Zuckerberg made a statement during an earnings call that should have received more attention. He described Meta’s place in the AI race, stating that the company was running its suite of applications “in a compute-starved state.” Meta, a business that made tens of billions of dollars from advertising last year, is experiencing a computer power shortage. Meta’s 2025 budget had already increased to between $70 billion and $72 billion, and the company indicated that 2026 would be “notably larger.” This comment was intended to justify a massive increase in capital spending. As I listened to it, the…

EnFi, a startup located in a small Boston office building, is implementing artificial intelligence agents to read credit applications, evaluate borrower risk, and make lending recommendations at the kinds of regional and community banks that have never had the technology budget to compete with JPMorgan or Bank of America. Ten years ago, this would have seemed unthinkable to a bank regulator. EnFi closed a $15 million funding round led by Fintop in February 2026, with investors connected to over 150 financial institutions participating. As of right now, $22.5 million has been raised, which is not much by venture capital standards…

Alex Lupsasca works as a black hole researcher. He works at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University and is interested in the mathematics of event horizons, which are boundaries that nothing, not even light, can cross. It’s the kind of work that takes months of calculation and theoretical refinement, moving slowly and alone. He discovered new symmetries in the equations controlling the form of a black hole’s event horizon last summer. His research was published. When he met the chief research officer at OpenAI a few months later, he was advised to test the most recent iteration of their AI agent on the…

In the spring of 2025, AbbVie’s leadership sat down to make a decision that must have felt simultaneously obvious and uncomfortable. The obesity drug market — dominated by Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy and Eli Lilly’s Zepbound, built around a class of drugs called GLP-1 receptor agonists — was already producing billions in annual revenue and growing faster than almost anything else in pharmaceuticals. It did not include AbbVie, a North Chicago-based company well-known for its immunology portfolio and Humira. Not one. And the window to enter wasn’t going to stay open indefinitely. In an attempt to predict that the next wave…

Imagine following a blue fire with your hand as you drag a kayak paddle through pitch-black water at midnight. not reflected light from a lamp on the beach or a phone. Not a ruse. The water itself glowed as you passed through it; it was electric, cold, and alive. Mosquito Bay on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques is officially the brightest bioluminescent bay in the world. It was named by Guinness World Records in 2006 and attracts tourists from all over the world who can’t quite believe the photos are real. They exist. Dinoflagellates are single-celled organisms that produce…