News
June 2026, 2026
Swarm robots inspired by bees and ants could transform the future of mining. Researchers at Adelaide University have developed a new type of robotic system inspired by bees and ants that could make mining safer, more efficient and more sustainable.
June 25, 2026
Mapped: Which Countries Hold the Biggest Mineral Reserves? A small group of countries controls the world’s largest reserves of many of the minerals that power modern economies.
This map shows the top reserve-holding country for 18 key minerals, from iron ore and copper to rare earths and cobalt. In several cases, a single nation accounts for an outsized share of global reserves, creating potential supply chain bottlenecks and geopolitical leverage.
June 14, 2026
Giant fan-shaped structure found under East Antarctica. An international team of researchers including our Department of Geography has discovered a vast geological structure hidden beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The findings are published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Enormous subglacial basins
June 1, 2026
Ranked: Who Controls the World’s Uranium Supply? See visuals like this from many other data based on data from the World Nuclear Association, shows how annual uranium production has changed by country between 2015 and 2024.
Nuclear power is regaining momentum as countries seek stable electricity supplies and lower-carbon energy sources. That has pushed uranium, the fuel used in nuclear reactors, back into focus.
May 28, 2025
California’s first carbon vault starts trapping CO2 more than one mile underground. CRC starts CO2 injection at Carbon TerraVault, marking California’s first operational carbon storage project.
California has begun permanent underground carbon dioxide storage for the first time after California Resources Corporation (CRC) announced the first CO2 injection at its Carbon TerraVault I (CTV I) project in Kern County.
May 12, 2026
A massive eruption 74,000 years ago affected the whole planet – archaeologists use volcanic glass to figure out how people survived. If you were lucky 74,000 years ago, you would have survived the Toba supereruption, one of the largest catastrophic events that Earth has seen in the past 2.5 million years.
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.