Francis Halzen has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics, for IceCube: 5,160 light sensors frozen into a cubic km of Antarctic ice that caught the first high-energy neutrinos from deep space.

If Tuesday’s cute little newest cat ever discovered wasn’t geekily gorgeous enough for you, how about the youngest planet we’ve ever seen. Just look at its chubby cheeks! Who’s. beautiful bubba?

Researchers discover in Bolivia the first new cat species in over a century. And the story of how they found it is as cute as the cat itself.

Animal experimentation and organ transplant waiting lists are issues replete with ethical challenges and real suffering. Could we one day grow and harvest purpose built fully functioning organs? What about your own personal headless human body as a spare parts depot?

Neutrinos are fascinating particles. More than a trillion a second flood through your body, but science has only ever caught a sliver of them. Well now a sphere holding 20,000 tonnes of liquid, buried under southern China, has out-measured every previous experiment combined. It is one of physics’ oldest puzzles. Do these ghosts weigh anything, and how would we ever find out?

Deep questions. Fundamental breakthroughs. Allegations of theft and scandal. Fascinating times in the world of maths.

One tweet by one researcher has captured the zeitgeist and got us asking deep questions about the impact of AI on, literally, humanity.

The annual Eureka Prizes have been run, and won, by some awesome Aussie scientists. NerdNews profiles a few.

Perhaps the most famous piece of maths in history, and an absolute brute of a problem, has been given the AI treatment. What happened and why might it change mathematics forever?

A massive weekend for a massive telescope, a chance to shine a light on the stuff that doesn’t shine, & an old beauty reminds us why she’s so cool with possibly the most awesome images I’ve ever seen.

An Aussie cancer fighting legend has helped us take another step to conquering the cancer with a particularly nasty Aussie angle.

It has been an incredible year for robotics. A robot shredded the human half marathon world record earlier this year (50 minutes 26 seconds versus 57:20!). Weeks later, Sony dropped a robot that can beat the world’s best table tennis players. And now Usain Bolt himself would be watching a chunk of metal and wires zip past him. Where will this all end?

To celebrate National Science Week, NerdNews is shining a light on a team of marine scientists and traditional custodians for the work they have done in exploring these precious places.

The Guardian's Invertebrate of the Year countdown is on again and as always it is an incredible peek into the world of the spineless. NerdNews gives an Aussie legend some props, and finds, perhaps, an even cooler, immortal, invertebrate.

1990 Milli Vanilli were exposed as Mimey Vanilli. The Monkees were actively banned from playing on their early albums. Marvin Gaye’s estate took Robin Thicke and Pharrell to court over blurred lines and won. Pop is full of controversy. Well 2026 doesn’t disappoint … with an AI twist.

A French team has gone looking for the brain cells that hold our earliest smell memories. But do these memories lay dormant for decades only to burst back to life? Or are we subtly topping them up across the years?

One year on, the Grand Canyon's giant penis worm gets a sober second look. NerdNews asks ‘how does it measure up’?

AI is now hacking other AI!!!Breathless headlines. I’m doing radio and tv interviews. NerdNews takes a breath and asks ‘what really happened’ when some AI got out of its sandbox’?

A Sydney PhD student has traced one of space's most baffling radio signals to a white dwarf feeding off its neighbour, the clearest clue yet to a mystery that has held out for years.

Most neuroscientists locate consciousness in our wrinkly cortexes, the outer layer of our brains where thought and sensation are supposed to live. But a growing band of rebels says the lights of experience may switch on far deeper, in the brain’s ancient core. And that cracks the door open to an even stranger idea. Could awareness be everywhere?