Apr 12th, 2026 - Set in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, Shamwari Private Game Reserve has sublime scenery as a backdrop to each game sighting. The Bushman's River flows through the Reserve, providing a riparian zone for waterbirds, hippos and a profusion of plant species. With five separate biomes, the panoramic ecosystem - ever-changing on a game drive or bush walk - displays a variety of trees, bushes, succulents and grasslands where an abundance of flowers peep through, adding splashes of colour. The Brunsvigia bosmaniae burst out of their bulbs into flower in Autumn, in a spectacular display. When the ... [Read More]

Apr 11th, 2026 - The Artemis II astronauts concluded their record-breaking 10-day journey on Friday with a smooth splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. NASA's Artemis II mission, the first crewed flight around the moon in more than 50 years, has been a feast for the eyes. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch and Victor Glover and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen concluded their 10-day mission Friday evening with a splash-down landing in the Pacific Ocean . The crew launched April 1 on the 10-day journey, which took them around the far side of the moon. They traveled farther from Earth than any humans had ... [Read More]

Apr 10th, 2026 - HPE accelerates quantum readiness ahead of Q-day Enterprise tech is already preparing for "Q-day" — when quantum computing will be able to break today's public-key cryptography.  Although that date is still years away, staying ahead of the curve is a necessity if companies want to secure their infrastructure and incorporate quantum into the existing artificial intelligence and high-performance computing stack. Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. has become a key player in readying the industry for quantum, leading initiatives that accelerate quantum computing innovation  while ... [Read More]

Apr 10th, 2026 - Reading time 2 minutes Bad news for skywatchers: A sungrazing comet that was set to put on a bright display succumbed to a fateful encounter with our host star. Comet MAPS (C/2026 A1) was obliterated during its perihelion, or closest approach to the Sun, on Saturday, April 4. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) captured the comet's death dive as it came within 99,000 miles (160,000 kilometers) of the Sun's atmosphere. The joint NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) SOHO mission constantly watches the Sun from about 932,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) away. During its observing ... [Read More]

Apr 10th, 2026 - Oldest octopus fossil found to not be an octopus  Supposed "first octopus" was something else entirely. Pohlsepia mazonensis, a visually underwhelming fossil from Illinois, fundamentally broke our understanding of cephalopod evolution. Described in 2000 and hailed as the oldest known octopus in the fossil record, the specimen dated back to the late Carboniferous period, roughly 311 to 306 million years ago. Pohlsepia was an outlier—all other fossil records strongly suggested that crown coleoids, the group containing octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish, diverged much later, during the ... [Read More]

Apr 10th, 2026 - New fundamental physics measurement deepens quantum mystery Physicists have measured the mass of one of the universe's basic building blocks, the W boson particle. The new calculation, made at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, could help solve a niggling mystery about this particle's mass . About 80 times heavier than protons, W bosons are among the heaviest of nature's fundamental particles, which can't be broken down into smaller bits. They carry the weak force, which allows other particles to morph from one type to another in processes such as the radioactive decay of uranium ... [Read More]

Apr 10th, 2026 - Forget software patches and firewalls. The threat of physics itself is kicking off what is perhaps the most consequential cybersecurity arms race in the digital era. Quantum Day (Q-Day), the moment when commercially available quantum computers can break widely used cryptographic systems, is no longer a distant hypothetical. It's approaching faster than many firms expected, with Google now pushing a 2029 timeline for quantum-safe readiness. As a result of the shrinking strategic horizon, what was once a theoretical, deep-tech risk is instead now being operationalized into present-day ... [Read More]

Apr 10th, 2026 - In this week's newsletter: Once close to extinction, the species is rebounding due to years of conservation work Don't get Down to Earth delivered to your inbox? Sign up here I will never forget the moment I first saw a mountain gorilla. It was early on Mount Muhabura in Uganda, and I had spent the morning stumbling up the slopes of the inactive volcano in the Virunga range, which also spans Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo . Just when I thought my lungs could not take it any more, I noticed the silhouette of a creature picking leaves off a branch in a forest clearing. It was ... [Read More]