America’s Emerald Isle

The sci-fi film Project Hail Mary, currently in theaters, is capturing the attention of both audiences and the scientific community for its science-based content. It manages to engage viewers with complex, cutting-edge topics—from astrophysics to language—without sacrificing entertainment. Yet not all films strike this balance. Many have promoted inaccurate or even misleading scientific ideas, and, thanks to their wide reach, have contributed to shaping distorted public perceptions of science.

It's autumn in the Southern Hemisphere, which means it's fog season in the Victorian Alps. NASA's Terra satellite captured this view of morning fog filling valleys in several national parks across the mountains of eastern Victoria in May.

Archaeologists have found something unexpected inside a 1,600-year-old Roman-era Egyptian mummy: a fragment of Homer's Iliad. It wasn't placed beside the body, but inside the mummy's abdomen. But the real surprise isn't just where the fragment was found. It's how it got there. To understand, we must go back—to the Iliad itself, and to what it became in the Roman world.

Scientists at UBC Okanagan have uncovered how plants produce mitraphylline, a rare natural compound with promising anti cancer potential. The team identified two enzymes that work together to build the molecule’s unusual twisted structure, solving a mystery that had puzzled researchers for years. Because mitraphylline appears only in tiny amounts in tropical plants like kratom and cat’s claw, the discovery could make it far easier to produce sustainably in the future.