The second major meteor shower of the year starts today and peaks on the night of April 21–22. Here’s everything you need to know to watch it and the many other showers that will appear in 2025.https://www.wired.com/story/watch-meteor-showers-2025-shooting-stars-ursids-geminids-leonids-orionids-perseids-southern-delta-aquariids-lyrids-quadrantids/
The abrupt firing of Xiaofeng Wang and his wife from Indiana University last month shocked the academic community and is stoking fears that Chinese-born scholars are being targeted.https://www.wired.com/story/professor-xiaofeng-wang-update/
Microsoft held off on releasing the privacy-unfriendly feature after a swell of pushback last year. Now it’s trying again, with a few improvements that skeptics say still aren't enough.https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-recall-returns-privacy/
GPT 4.1, GPT 4.1 Mini, and GPT 4.1 Nano are all available now—and will help OpenAI compete with Google and Anthropic.https://www.wired.com/story/openai-announces-4-1-ai-model-coding/
These beard tools deliver an excellent trim for all types of facial hair.https://www.wired.com/gallery/best-beard-trimmers/
Meet the Sakura, the best-selling electric car in Japan. It has driver assistance, auto-parking, fast charging, bi-directional power, and acres of charm. The killer stat: It only costs $17,000.https://www.wired.com/review/review-nissan-sakura-2025/
If future Mars colonizers want to survive without pressure suits, they’ll need to generate a denser atmosphere. One way to achieve this could be to bombard the Red Planet with water-rich asteroids.https://www.wired.com/story/terraform-mars-by-throwing-asteroids/
A lawsuit over the Trump administration’s infamous Houthi Signal group chat has revealed what steps departments took to preserve the messages—and how little they actually saved.https://www.wired.com/story/heres-what-happened-to-those-signalgate-messages/
Though the exact details of the situation have not been confirmed, community infighting seems to have spilled out in a breach of the notorious image board.https://www.wired.com/story/2025-4chan-hack-admin-leak/
The 18-year-old won $250,000 for training a machine learning model to analyze understudied data from NASA's retired NEOWISE telescopehttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/high-school-student-discovers-1-5-million-potential-new-astronomical-objects-by-developing-an-ai-algorithm-180986429/
Ronin, a 5-year-old African giant pouched rat, has found 109 land mines and 15 other unexploded ordnances in Cambodiahttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/super-sniffing-rat-sets-a-new-world-record-for-discovering-deadly-land-mines-and-hes-just-getting-started-180986432/
Created in the Grotesque style, the 16th-century images—revealed by renovations at a lodge in England—mimic historic textile designshttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/see-the-fantastical-beasts-and-foliage-featured-in-these-rare-newly-discovered-tudor-wall-paintings-180986431/
Mercury concentrations in fig trees could provide useful information about mining activity in the rainforest over timehttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/tree-rings-bear-witness-to-illegal-gold-mining-operations-in-the-amazon-new-study-finds-180986390/
From river walks to local art and culture, these destinations deliver outdoor thrills and cultural surprises just off the C&O Canalhttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/sponsored/adventure-awaits-beyond-the-trail-at-these-four-co-canal-destinations-180986327/
Ornithologist Bruce Beehler tracks down what he calls the “Magnificent Seven,” a charismatic group of migratory birds, in his new bookhttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/inside-the-epic-migrations-of-north-americas-most-fascinating-shorebirds-180986428/
Historical accounts of vast ocean waters glowing in the dark go back hundreds of years, and researchers are still trying to determine exactly what triggers the phenomenonhttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/glowing-milky-seas-have-baffled-sailors-for-centuries-new-research-brings-scientists-one-step-closer-to-solving-the-mystery-180986421/
To thank America for its support during the war, France sent a boxcar stuffed with gifts to each state. But in the late 1950s, New Jersey's disappeared without a tracehttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/long-lost-merci-train-given-to-new-jersey-after-world-war-ii-has-been-found-180986420/
The animals graze the vegetation into a picturesque turf, fertilize the soil with their dung and disperse seeds over large distanceshttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/thousands-of-giant-tortoises-anchor-a-thriving-ecosystem-on-aldabra-a-remote-atoll-in-the-indian-ocean-180986362/
1925 marked the peak of the Florida land boom. But false advertising and natural disasters thwarted many settlers' visions of striking it rich in the land of sunshinehttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-dreams-of-buried-pirate-treasure-enticed-americans-to-flock-to-florida-during-the-roaring-twenties-180986376/
The 30-day ceasefire brokered by the Trump administration was meant to lead to a wider cessation of hostilities. It did not.https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/04/16/russia-ukraine-expiration-energy-ceasefire/