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Why 1000 citizen scientists from 25 countries across the world buried their cotton underpants

What happens when you bury a pair of cotton underpants in the ground and come back two months later? For nearly 1,000 citizen scientists in Switzerland, the answer offered an unusual window into the hidden world beneath their feet.

Aug 29 • 1:37 AM EDT • Science • timesofindia.indiatimes.com

We’re travelling around Queensland and the water in this tiny outback town smells rather strange — but the science of what’s happening 500 metres beneath our feet is fascinating

We’re travelling around Queensland at the moment, and one of the things I love about travelling this way is that you never quite know what is going to

Sep 7 • 1:47 AM EDT • Science • scienceblog.com

One of Earth’s most powerful supervolcanoes is refilling with fresh magma

Deep beneath Japan’s Kikai caldera, a massive magma reservoir is refilling 7,300 years after one of the most powerful volcanic eruptions in Earth's recent geological history. Scientists used underwater seismic surveys to reveal a vast store of magma that appears to have accumulated since the ancient catastrophe. The discovery could help explain how supervolcanoes like Yellowstone and Toba rebuild their magma supplies.

Oct 22 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Zombie sea cucumbers and the future of tissue engineering | Investors Lab

It's pretty cool, but not exactly news, that lizards can regrow their tails and starfish can regenerate arms. However, the lost or discarded body parts typically decay and die within a few days or weeks. Not so for those of at least one kind of sea cucumber. Researchers have found that detached tissue from these marine invertebrates can remain alive independently for years. Their findings could have a real impact on how we understand tissue culture, regeneration and aging in medical science. Saugat Bolakhe takes us beneath the surface for SN.

Jul 29 • 9:15 AM EDT • Science • sciencenews.org

Intel Panther Lake Teardown, 18A, BSPD, GAAFET, SemiAnalysis STEEL

Panther Lake debuts the first commercial implementation of backside power delivery (BSPDN), introduces Intel’s first iteration of gate-all-around (GAA) transistors, and showcases their advanced packaging capabilities with its Foveros-S assembly. With Panther Lake, Intel’s manufacturing arc has shifted from nebulous roadmaps to shipped silicon, a significant milestone on their long road back to competitive semiconductor manufacturing. To evaluate the extent of Intel’s comeback, we tore down Panther Lake. The SemiAnalysis STEEL teardown lab breaks down advanced datacenter and AI hardware. To learn more about our pipeline or to commission a teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. WE’RE HIRING: Architecture, floorplan, packaging, manufacturing, and labs experts. Opportunities from system to transistor and everywhere in between. Check out our Careers page. Our teardown traces 18A from its four-sheet RibbonFETs (Intel’s marketing name for GAAFETs) and gate stacks through contacts, frontside and backside wiring, and the bonded carrier. We explain how these material and integration choices improve gate control and reduce resistance, while adding capacitance, thermal resistance, and process complexity. Our measurements put Panther Lake’s 18A compute logic and TSMC N3E GPU logic at similar logic density. However, 18A does not lead TSMC N3P, N2 or Samsung SF2 in peak density. Panther Lake’s CPU cores are incremental updates, and the high-end GPU still uses TSMC N3E. Panther Lake assembles one compute tile, one GPU tile, and one I/O tile atop a passive base tile using Intel’s Foveros-S advanced packaging. Both compute tile variants use Intel 18A. The Xe3 GPU options are a 4-core GT1 tile on Intel 3 and a larger 12-core GT2 tile on TSMC N3E. Both I/O tile variants use TSMC N6. [1], [2] Our analysis centers on the PTL-U compute tile, both the 4-core and 12-core GPU tiles, as well as the 12-lane I/O tile. In conventional chips, power and signal are routed through the same frontside metal stack towards the device frontend. Power rails consume scarce routing resources near the transistors, while tall via stacks carry VDD and VSS from the coarse upper wires to local rails. Backside power delivery (BSPD) moves the main power network behind the transistor layer, to the backside, separating it from frontside signal routing. We covered BSPD and its impacts in 2024. [3], [4], [5] Intel’s BSPD implementation, branded as “PowerVia”, routes power through dedicated backside metals to nano-TSVs, which connect those rails to local source/drain (S/D) contacts. Implementing that separation requires Intel to build the interconnect stacks from both sides of the wafer. The frontside comprises the M0-M14 signal stack, while the backside comprises the BM0-BM5 power stack. M0 and BM0 are closest to the transistors. The nano-TSVs connect the two sides, but Intel patterns and etches each via from the front after forming the contacts. A narrow via runs from the side of the contact deep into the silicon substrate. Intel then completes the frontside signal metal stack, bonds the wafer to a carrier, flips it and removes the original substrate until the buried via tips are exposed. The backside metal stack is then deposited directly on the revealed vias. The nano-TSV and backside-via profiles taper in opposite directions because Intel forms them from opposite sides of the wafer. The transistor structures form the FEOL. Local contacts and nano-TSVs connect them to the wiring. M0 begins the frontside interconnect stack. The silicon carrier remains attached above the frontside interconnects. It supports the device wafer during substrate removal and backside processing and remains part of the finished chip’s thermal path. PowerVia removes the main power distribution from the congested frontside metals, routing supply through shorter and wider backside wires. Its lateral landing still occupies area in the standard cell, so it recovers less cell area than a direct backside contact. [3] Nano-TSVs beside the logic devices carry VDD or VSS from the backside power network, while signal connections continue upward through the frontside metals. Backside Interconnects Samsung SF2 data is included for comparison to Panther Lake’s within this article. SF2 is the incumbent GAA foundry node but lacks BSPD, serving as a useful reference to evaluate 18A. A full teardown of Samsung’s S26 products, processed on SF2, will be shared soon.Nanosheet-cut EDS comparison. The PowerVia supply path runs from the backside Cu rails through Mo-lined W nano-TSVs to the local transistor contacts. In this cross section, the tapered connection spans roughly 150 nm from the contact level to BM0. The Ta liner confines Cu and promotes adhesion to the surrounding stack; the AlOₓ etch stop controls the next dielectric etch above the rail. Dielectric beneath the ribbons electrically separates the devices from the backside wiring and removes the conducting silicon body below the channel. [6] AlOₓ serves as an etchstop (ES), enabling endpointing and protecting the underlying layers. Low-volatility aluminum fluoride reaction products resist the fluorinated plasma, allowing a thin AlOₓ film to protect the metal while the surrounding low-k dielectric is removed. [6], [7]. While the BM0 and layers above the M1 lines show double AlOx layers, Our SMIC N+3 teardown showed single AlOₓ layers. SMIC uses a simpler local AlOₓ substack, while the remaining cap and etch sequence provide the required landing protection. So why double layers? The closely spaced AlOₓ doublets provide two protected endpoints in the etch sequence. Intel documents an AlOₓ/SiN/AlOₓ stack that explains the benefit. The main dielectric plasma etch stops on the first AlOₓ film; a selective wet clear opens that film; a second plasma etch removes the intermediate SiN and stops on the second AlOₓ film. The final wet clear exposes the metal landing surface. SiN is the intermediate dielectric in Intel’s published example. [8] The second stop protects the metal through a cap breakthrough. Wide openings can etch faster than narrow ones, and etch depth varies across the wafer. Metal under an early-clearing opening would otherwise be exposed while other openings still need more etching. Staged protection widens the process window and reduces metal erosion, corrosion and void formation. [8] TSMC documents AlN/AlOₓ/SiOC/AlOₓ above Cu, with AlN blocking Cu diffusion, and a simpler AlN/SiOC/AlOₓ variant that omits one AlOx film. [9] Levels with different opening sizes, aspect ratios, pattern densities and cap materials need different etch margins. A double AlOx stop is useful where another protected endpoint justifies the added processing. The extra film adds formation, selective opening and cleaning steps, plus another set of interfaces to control adhesion, moisture, and stress. These blanket films are opened through the existing via pattern, so each film does not require another lithography mask. AlOₓ adds parasitic capacitance when it replaces lower-k dielectric; two thin AlOₓ films can nevertheless contain less AlOₓ than one thick film. Total thickness, placement, and theintermediate dielectric determine the electrical cost. Deposition chemistry also changes AlOx permittivity and residual hydroxyl content, which can oxidize the underlying metal. [7], [8], [10], [11] The backside stack separates into relatively fine BM0-BM2 wiring near the devices and coarser BM3-BM5 power distribution. The largest pitch increase occurs between BM2 and BM3. BM0’s pitch closely matches the logic-row height, fitting local power delivery to the cell rows. Higher levels aggregate current through larger conductors: routing density becomes less important than low resistance and current capacity as the network approaches the package. This hierarchy provides wide power wiring for the power delivery network without consuming scarce frontside signal-routing resources. [3] The SemiAnalysis STEEL teardown lab breaks down advanced datacenter and AI hardware. To learn more about our pipeline or to commission a teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. WE’RE HIRING: Architecture, floorplan, packaging, manufacturing, and labs experts. Opportunities from system to transistor and everywhere in between. Check out our Careers page. Frontside Interconnects Intel 18A combines Mo-lined W contacts and nano-TSVs with a separate backside Cu power network. Samsung SF2 keeps power on the frontside, using Ti-based contact interfaces and Ta-based barriers and Co liners around Cu wiring. In 18A standard-cell rows, backside power rails supply the devices through nano-TSVs within the cells, freeing frontside routing resources. Samsung’s M0 accommodates both power and signal connections. From the device toward M0, the connection runs through a Ti-based S/D interface, W contact fill, a Mo-lined W via, and the Cu M0 wire. Mo supplies a conductive nucleation and adhesion layer for W, replacing the resistive TiN liner used in conventional W integration. This increases the effective conduction volume within the feature while retaining W fill and its established polishing, cleaning and etching processes. Intel’s Mo/W patent describes this integration tradeoff. The nano-TSV uses the same Mo-lined W construction in the backside supply path. [12] The move from TiN to Mo is an incremental change. While a full Co or Mo fill can also reduce the volume lost to liners in very small features, it requires new integration schemes that increase complexity and risk. Cu remains attractive for wider wires due to its low resistance. As wires and vias shrink, the diffusion barrier consumes an increasing fraction of their cross-section. [12], [12], [14] Intel uses Co/Ru liners at M0-M1, Co at M2-M4, and Nb at M5-M9. The lower-level liners help Cu adhere and reduce void formation during trench fills. Applied Materials’ Endura has new thermal control that facilitate wetting process, so the thin film continuity is good enough that good capillary pressure will drive Cu atoms to the via bottom without voiding. Intel’s choice to use Nb is particularly interesting. Intel’s Nb patent describes a conductive diffusion barrier intended to reduce the barrier’s contribution to resistance relative to conventional Ta-based barriers, particularly at via bottoms where all current crosses the barrier. The patent pairs Nb in coarser levels with the option of lower-cost PVD processing. [15], [16] The upper metal layers support thicker barriers formed through physical vapor deposition (PVD) despite its worse coverage and uniformity. Meanwhile, the lower metal layers require thinner barriers deposited through conformal atomic layer deposition (ALD). Co/Ru adds another material interface and requires controlled deposition and Cu fill. Changing liners and barriers by metal layer allows Intel to optimize interconnect resistance, process complexity, and reliability. [15, 16] RibbonFET, Intel’s name for its gate-all-around FETs (GAAFETs), replaces the FinFET’s vertical fins with four stacked horizontal silicon nanosheets, allowing the gate to surround the channel on every side. The path to GAAFET begins with the planar transistor. A planar MOSFET places the gate above the channel between its source and drain. Pairing an NMOS with a PMOS transistor creates a CMOS inverter, in which the NMOS pulls the output low for a high input, and the PMOS pulls it high for a low input. The gate must retain electrostatic control of the channel to ensure clean switching. As gate lengths shrank, the drain began to compete with the gate for that control, increasing off-state leakage. Electrostatic control was restored through an architectural evolution that raised the channel into a vertical fin and wrapping the gate around three sides. Called “FinFET”, this new architecture packed more effective channel width into a smaller footprint. Further scaling made it harder to maintain both drive current and leakage within smaller cells, and reintroduced the same problems planar MOSFETs faced. Nanosheet GAAFETs close the fourth side by replacing the vertical fin with a stack of horizontal nanosheets, each surrounded by the gate. The tighter electrostatic control suppresses leakage at shorter gate lengths while stacking adds effective channel width within the cell footprint. In a FinFET process, channel width changes in discrete steps as designers must add or remove whole fins. Nanosheet width can instead be adjusted continuously within the process’s design rules. Wider sheets increase drive current, while narrower sheets reduce capacitance at the cost of drive current. Intel 18A uses stacks of four nanosheets each and varies their widths across logic and SRAM. At the process level, adding more sheets to each stack increases effective channel width and drive current, but complicates fabrication. RibbonFET vs MBCFET Samsung began GAAFET production in 2022 with SF3E, following with SF3 and now SF2. Its ‘MBCFET’ provides a useful structural comparison with Intel’s first RibbonFET implementation. [17] STEEL is digging deeper into SF2, used in the Exynos 2600, and TSMC’s GAAFET N2, used in Apple’s A20 Pro, in upcoming newsletter articles. We’re throwing some teasers on X. Let’s compare Samsung SF2’s MBCFET with Intel 18A’s RibbonFET. Subscribe Even to the untrained eye, Intel’s extra nanosheet is obvious. Intel stacks four ribbons to Samsung’s three. Samsung’s sheets are much wider in these fields, so both sheet count and width matter to the available channel perimeter. Sheet width also changes which silicon surfaces carry current. On conventional (001) silicon, wide nanosheets emphasize the broad top and bottom surfaces, favoring electron transport; the larger sidewall contribution in a narrow sheet favors hole transport. Thinner sheets improve gate control but increase confinement and scattering. This makes width and thickness part of the NMOS/PMOS balance, alongside strain and threshold voltage. [18], [19] GAAFET designs like 18A use different work-function-metal (WFM) stacks for NMOS and PMOS. Around each ribbon, a thin SiOx interfacial layer separates the silicon channel from the HfOx high-k dielectric, with La providing dipole tuning and the WFM wrapping the dielectric. NMOS uses a TiAl-based stack, while PMOS uses TiN WFM. W fills the remaining gate trench, providing a lower-resistivity path where the work-function layers are no longer needed. In this field, the PMOS stacks leave room for W between ribbons, while the NMOS stacks occupy more of those gaps. A silicon-based dielectric marks the P/N boundary, allowing the PMOS and NMOS gates, sharing the same gate trench, to be processed sequentially. Fast logic paths, retention circuits, and SRAM need a family of threshold options. Changing threshold without substantially changing device dimensions, capacitance or fabrication complexity is valuable. FinFET processes typically use different work-function-metal stacks. In a four-ribbon GAA stack, the narrow sheet-to-sheet gap limits how much WFM can fit around each channel. La in the gate dielectric creates interfacial dipoles at the SiOx/HfOx boundary, shifting effective work function and tuning threshold voltage. This gives Intel another control alongside its NMOS and PMOS WFM stacks. Low-threshold devices improve critical-path drive; higher thresholds reduce leakage elsewhere. Dipole tuning is especially useful in GAA because it changes threshold without consuming the narrow intersheet gap with thicker WFM. Precise control of La incorporation, diffusion and interface quality has long been a challenge, limiting viability in high volume production but is now seen from every leading-edge foundry. Intel’s patent describes depositing a dipole-forming oxide above HfOx and annealing it toward the interfacial oxide before completing the work-function and fill metals. This separates threshold tuning from the space available for metal. Newer research addresses the thermal cost: imec’s 2026 dipole-middle research inserts the shifter between two HfOx depositions, shortening the diffusion path while protecting SiOx during patterning. [20], [21]Matched-cut EDS, Intel 18A (left) vs. Samsung SF2 (right). Intel retains raised source/drain epi beneath its contacts, while Samsung recesses W deep into the epi to form a V-shaped Ti-lined interface. The deeper contact increases metal-to-semiconductor area and shortens the current path from the lower sheets, reducing contact and spreading resistance. It also removes epi volume and brings the contact etch closer to the channel ends. Retaining more epi preserves the material available for strain transfer, especially from SiGe into PMOS. These geometries balance contact access against stress engineering and etch margin. [22], [23] Samsung stacks three sheets to Intel’s four ribbons, and both processes use sheet width to tune drive strength. In our Samsung cross-sections, widths range roughly from 19 to 30 nm in the NPU rows and 37 to 50 nm in the CU cell. The Samsung nanosheets taper, with the widest sheet at the bottom and the narrowest at the top. Both processes use HfOx gate dielectric and Ti-based work-function stacks, with Al in the NMOS stack. In the Samsung devices shown here, the dielectric and WFM occupy the intersheet gaps, leaving W above the top sheet. Intel’s PMOS stack leaves more room between ribbons, and W fills those gaps while the thicker NMOS stack leaves W mainly in the upper trench. Gate-stack EDS maps. The W between Intel’s PMOS ribbons provides a conductive path close to the lower gates. Where WFM fills the entire gap, the gate still surrounds the channel, but voltage reaches it through the more resistive work-function films. Thinner WFM and dipole tuning preserve room for low-resistivity fill; Mo and Ru are alternative fill metals being developed for further scaling. [24] A masked, sequential WFM flow explains the different gate heights and inter-nanosheet fill. The proposed sequence below shows how separate NMOS and PMOS work-function steps produce that geometry. Enabled by the BSPDN process, Intel replaces the dense-logic silicon subfin with dielectric, removing the parasitic conduction path below the ribbons and reducing substrate-related capacitance. A retained silicon body as in classical, non-SOI, planar and FinFET designs needs junction and punchthrough-stop engineering to suppress leakage. Dielectric isolation makes that leakage less sensitive to the subfin doping profile but adds removal and fill steps. It also weakens the direct thermal path through silicon, making the contacts, metal stacks and package more important for heat extraction. [24], [26] Fluorine is concentrated around selected Intel device structures in the maps. WF6 is a standard precursor for W nucleation and fill, while barrier films protect adjacent dielectrics from fluorine attack. Low-fluorine W processes reduce the residual-F burden. Chloride-based precursors avoid introducing F during W deposition, but require control of chlorine attack, nucleation and fill quality. The integration target is a continuous, low-resistance W path with a thin protective liner and minimal chemical damage to the surrounding stack. [20], [27], [28] The SemiAnalysis STEEL teardown lab breaks down advanced datacenter and AI hardware. To learn more about our pipeline or to commission a teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. WE’RE HIRING: Architecture, floorplan, packaging, manufacturing, and labs experts. Opportunities from system to transistor and everywhere in between. Check out our Careers page. We measured cell height, gate pitch, metal geometry, and ribbon dimensions at the XTEM sites shown below. The tables group these dimensions by site and device polarity. Our “sheet cuts” cross the silicon channel and show the ribbons end-on. “gate cuts” run along the channel through successive gates. The 18A logic cell dimensions point to a five-track logic library while the N3E and Intel 3 cell dimensions evidence a seven-track logic library. The DDR-PHY uses wider M0 wires and much larger spacing than core logic. That trades routing density for lower wire resistance and weaker coupling between neighboring nets. The geometry suits the current delivery and coupling requirements of analog, clock, and I/O circuitry. PowerVia lets 18A combine a compact cell height with wider M0 geometry by moving the main power rails off the signal-routing tracks. That relaxes local wire scaling while preserving a small cell footprint. Cell height and gate pitch set the geometric density; pin access and routability determine how much of it a real block can use. [29] The biggest takeaway from our gate-pitch measurements is that Intel 18A compute logic and TSMC N3E GPU logic have similar density in the Bohr representative-cell model. The 18A example is 18.6% denser than the Intel 3 GPU example. Gate pitches are nearly identical across the three sites, so cell height drives most of the difference. The Bohr model combines a four-transistor NAND2 spanning three gate pitches and a 32-transistor scan flip-flop (SFF) spanning nineteen pitches, weighting their densities 60:40. The sensitivity column shows how independently changing cell height and gate pitch by ±1 nm changes the result. This compares representative cell geometries; whole-die density also depends on cell mix and placement. The 18A P-core gives M0 substantially more metal cross section than the N3E vector engine. Treating each profile as a trapezoid gives 2.63 times the area per line and 1.84 times the area after normalization by routing pitch. The larger section reduces the geometric contribution to line resistance and lowers current density for a given current. Taller and wider wires also add capacitance, so circuit delay depends on the balance of resistance and capacitance. The DDR-PHY has less metal area per routing width than the 18A core fields, while remaining above N3E. [30] Area = height × (top CD + bottom CD) / 2, including liners. Area/pitch normalizes by routing width. Taper is the symmetric sidewall angle from vertical, with the largest angle belonging to the DDR-PHY. Compute tile The measurements show how ribbon dimensions and gate-stack geometry vary across the compute tile and between NMOS and PMOS to balance channel drive, gate load and the space needed for the dielectric/WFM stack across logic, SRAM and the DDR-PHY. Width mainly changes available channel perimeter; thickness also changes electrostatic control and carrier confinement. Gate-stack thickness then determines the space left for low-resistivity fill P-core and LP E-core logic Both the P-core and LP E-core use multiple nanosheet widths. Widths are measured on high-magnification XTEMs while wider-field images demonstrate additional width choices within the LP E-core. Multiple widths are expected even within an LP E-core. Timing-critical paths, buffers and cells with different fanout need different drive strengths. The lower-magnification fields show this width diversity beyond the sites quantified in the table. L2 and L3 SRAM GAA gives SRAM designers another way to balance the pull-up (PU), pass-gate (PG), and pull-down (PD) transistors. FinFET bitcells set device strength through fin count while GAA adds nanosheet width as a sizing knob. In a 6T SRAM cell, a strong pull-down relative to the pass-gate limits read disturbance, while a strong pass-gate relative to the pull-up improves writability. During a write, the pass-gate and write driver pull the node storing “1” below the inverter trip point. During a read, the pull-down holds the node storing “0” low. Bias, threshold voltage, mismatch and assist circuitry set the remaining margin. FinFET high-current cells commonly use a PU:PG:PD fin-count pattern of 1:2:2, a device-sizing ratio rather than a current ratio. Ribbon width lets Intel balance SRAM strengths without adding whole fins. The L2 cell uses its narrowest ribbons for PU and widest for PD, improving writability and read stability respectively. Intel’s disclosed HCC operates without assist; its denser HDC uses negative-bitline write assist. Pulling the selected bitline briefly below ground increases pass-gate overdrive so it can overpower the pull-up at lower supply voltage. That buys density and low voltage writability at the cost of boosting circuitry, switching energy, and additional voltage stress that must be controlled. [31], [32] Four rectangular ribbons give the perimeter = 8 × (width + thickness), before corner rounding. PG/PU is 1.49 and PD/PG is 1.16. The L3 structures closely resemble L2 in layout and cell height. Fewer L3 nanosheet widths are tabulated because fewer high-magnification images were available. DDR PHY The DDR-PHY trades density for controlled analog behavior and reliable off-chip signaling. It contains drivers, receivers, delay circuits, and calibration logic that set drive strength, sampling time, and voltage margin. Repeated four-sheet devices with similar widths fit the use of regular transistor units for matching and programmable drive. Its wider local wiring provides room for current delivery and separation of sensitive signals, while consuming more area than a dense core-logic grid. The layout serves the memory channel’s electrical requirements as well as digital logic density. [33] The SemiAnalysis STEEL teardown lab breaks down advanced datacenter and AI hardware. To learn more about our pipeline or to commission a teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. WE’RE HIRING: Architecture, floorplan, packaging, manufacturing, and labs experts. Opportunities from system to transistor and everywhere in between. Check out our Careers page. Intel 3 GPU devices Vector engine logic Intel 3’s XVE logic uses two-fin PMOS and NMOS devices with power rails in M0. Its cell height and M0 pitch give a seven-track geometry, two tracks more than the 18A logic. One-fin groups also appear among the two-fin devices. Intel 3 L2 SRAM The Intel 3 L2 SRAM uses the familiar HCC sizing pattern: one PU fin, two PG fins, and two PD fins. N3E GPU devices Vector engine logic The N3E XVE field contains repeated two-fin devices with seven-track cell geometry. N3E remains a FinFET process, giving Panther Lake a direct FinFET-to-RibbonFET comparison. N3E L2 SRAM The N3E L2 SRAM uses the same PU:PG:PD fin-count pattern of 1:2:2. Panther Lake-U follows Lunar Lake’s floorplan quite closely. Both pair 4 P-cores with 4 LP E-cores and NPU, media and display engines in similar locations. Lunar Lake also uses Xe2, the direct predecessor to Panther Lake’s Xe3 GPU. This makes Lunar Lake the most direct basis for our comparisons. Arrow Lake differs in core count and uses the older Xe-LPG GPU architecture, so we only use it where it offers a more direct component-level comparison. Compute tile Panther Lake compute-tile floorplans remain sparse even months after launch. Intel 18A’s backside metal and dielectric stack must be removed without damaging the underlying structures before a clean transistor-level floorplan can be imaged. Most published die shots hide or heavily process the background, but we are quite proud of the die shot we achieved and are excited to show the work we have done. We measured the areas of the key components on the compute tile and compared them with their Lunar Lake predecessors on TSMC N3B. These help us to capture changes in block area and compare the two chips across process nodes and designs. Our total tile areas exclude the scribe-line area. The compute-plus-GPU subtotal below uses the PTL-U compute tile and GT1 GPU; it excludes the I/O tile and passive base. Individual block areas use the boundaries marked on the floorplans The compute-plus-GPU row is recomputed from the displayed PTL-U and GT1 areas. Component rows use their stated per-region counts and are not an additive partition of the whole tile. The P-core area remains almost unchanged between Lunar Lake and Panther Lake, despite L2 capacity increasing from 2.5 MiB to 3 MiB. Arrow Lake uses the same Lion Cove core as Lunar Lake but also has a 3 MiB L2. Cougar Cove fits 20% more L2 into the same P-core area. The larger private cache keeps more of each core’s working set close to its execution units, reducing access to shared L3 and DRAM. Extra capacity adds storage leakage and lookup energy, so designers balance it against avoided lower-level accesses. The shared P-core L3 cache also shrank by 14.8%. [2] Cougar Cove combines a similar footprint with Intel’s reported power-efficiency improvements. RibbonFET’s tighter channel control reduces leakage, while PowerVia reduces supply droop and allows tighter voltage guardbands. [1] Darkmont’s four-core LP E-core cluster is 5.0% smaller than Skymont’s on Lunar Lake, with most of the reduction in its L2 regions. The 1 MiB region shrank by 8.4% and the 1.5 MiB region by 14.9%. The tag arrays also use one fewer visible row. Tags identify which memory addresses the data array holds, so rearranging them changes the cache’s layout and wiring without requiring less data capacity. [2] The LP E-cores share one L2. This pools capacity and avoids duplicating all the cache machinery, but the four cores contend for its banks and bandwidth. Their separate cluster also keeps light work away from the performance cluster and its L3, allowing that larger domain to sleep. [1], [2] Cache area includes more than the storage cells. Tags identify each line, decoders select rows, sense amplifiers read the small bitline signal, and wires connect to the banks. Splitting an array into smaller sections shortens wordlines and bitlines, improving access speed, but duplicates peripheral circuits. Panther Lake’s smaller cache regions therefore reflect the complete memory implementation, including how much of each region is devoted to storage. [34] Unlike Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake, Panther Lake has no separate SoC tile. The NPU, LP E-cores, memory controllers, PHYs, media and display engines now share the compute tile. This removes an active die and keeps CPU memory traffic on one die. The cost is moving PHY and I/O-related circuitry onto 18A: drivers, receivers and analog circuits must still meet external voltage, loading and signal-integrity requirements, so their area does not shrink like dense digital logic. [1], [2] The biggest shrink comes from the NPU, which occupies 36.9% less area. NPU 5 consolidates the same total INT8 MAC count into half as many neural compute engines. Each of the three NCEs has a larger MAC array to make the complete NCE envelope 22.6% larger than an NPU 4 engine. Consolidation also halves the number of scratchpads and SHAVE DSPs, from 12 to 6. The MAC array handles matrix multiplication and convolution, while SHAVE executes vector and custom operations that fit the array poorly. [1], [2], [35] The paired floorplans identify each NCE envelope and its scratchpad, MAC, and SHAVE regions. Each measured MAC polygon is counted once per NCE in the area accounting below. The scratchpads store weights, activations, and intermediate results near the MAC arrays, allowing repeated use without fetching them again from DRAM. Halving their number delivers the largest measured area saving but leaves less local storage for the same total MAC count. Layers that no longer fit locally require smaller working tiles or more transfers of intermediate data. The benefit depends on keeping the enlarged arrays busy while managing that tighter storage budget. [36] NPU 5 also adds native FP8. Using half the operand width of FP16 reduces storage and transfer demand, helping workloads fit the smaller local memory budget. Lower precision and format-dependent range make scaling and model validation part of deployment. Hardware activation functions further reduce work that would otherwise occupy the programmable DSPs. [1], [2] Microsoft requires an NPU to deliver at least 40 TOPS for Copilot+ PCs. Both Lunar Lake and Panther Lake meet this threshold, but Panther Lake uses significantly less silicon. GPU tiles Panther Lake is Intel’s first product with Xe3, its latest GPU architecture. It offers two different GPU tiles: a smaller GT1 tile with 4 Xe3 cores on Intel 3 and a larger GT2 tile with 12 Xe3 cores on TSMC N3E. Panther Lake allows us to compare the same GPU architecture across both Intel 3 and TSMC N3E. Wildcat Lake adds a third Xe3 implementation on Intel 18A. A future newsletter will detail Xe3 and its implementation differences across all three process nodes. GT2 scales Xe3 to a different physical layout, with render slices arranged vertically instead of GT1’s horizontal arrangement. Slice placement sets the distances to shared cache banks and the D2D interface. Those wires consume area and add delay, so scaling the number of Xe cores also requires a new balance of cache placement, routing and timing. [1] What’s immediately obvious is that the GT2 tile on TSMC N3E has much smaller Xe cores than GT1. These block areas include logic, caches, and routing. An Xe core on the GT1 tile is ~69% larger than one on Lunar Lake, and ~55% larger than one on GT2. Intel 3 therefore uses substantially more area per Xe core. The block-area gap exceeds the measured logic and SRAM density gaps, bringing routing, timing targets, cell mix, and floorplan allocation into the comparison. The measured vector/matrix engine region is almost unchanged between Lunar Lake and Panther Lake’s GT2 tile. Xe3 retains eight 512-bit vector engines and eight 2048-bit XMX engines per core. Its gains also come from feeding those engines more effectively: more resident threads hide stalls, and variable register allocation lets shaders trade registers per thread against the number of threads kept active. [1] The shared L1/SLM capacity increased by 33% from 192 KiB to 256 KiB, while its area increased only 5%, raising effective density by 27%. L1 retains reused cache lines, while software-managed SLM lets a thread group share data locally. Both reduce traffic to more distant memory. Allocating more SLM per group can also limit how many groups reside on a core at once. [1], [37] The GT1 tile carries 4 MiB of L2 against 16 MiB on the GT2 tile. GT1 divides its L2 cache into four 1 MiB banks, while GT2 uses eight 2 MiB banks. Each bank contains 128 macros, but each N3E macro stores 16 KiB, twice the Intel 3 macro’s 8 KiB capacity. The N3E macro is only 54% larger while holding twice as many bits, giving it 30% higher density: ~23.7 Mbit/mm² versus 18.3 Mbit/mm². Including bank-level circuitry, the gap widens to ~16.9 Mbit/mm² on GT2 versus ~10.4 Mbit/mm² on GT1. GT2 gains density with its macros storing more bits per unit area, and those macros occupy more of each cache bank. Larger macros spread decoder and sense-amplifier overhead across more storage, while a more compact bank layout reduces the share spent on control and routing. The compromise is longer wordlines and bitlines that carry more capacitance. [34] I/O tile Panther Lake uses two I/O tile variants, both fabricated on TSMC N6. The smaller one provides 4 PCIe 5.0 and 8 PCIe 4.0 lanes and serves lower-tier systems as well as those without a discrete GPU, while the larger one adds 8 PCIe 5.0 lanes, bringing the total to 20 lanes, for discrete-GPU connectivity. Panther Lake SKUs with the larger 10- or 12-Xe GPUs use the smaller I/O tile. [38] The smaller I/O tile adds a PCIe 4.0 block and a Thunderbolt block to Lunar Lake’s I/O layout, providing four additional PCIe 4.0 lanes and another Thunderbolt 4 port. Its repeated N6 blocks retain nearly identical areas and layouts. Reusing these proven PHYs and controllers avoids porting and requalifying external interfaces on 18A, where faster digital logic offers less benefit to circuits constrained by the off-chip link. [38] SemiAnalysis’s teardown lab (STEEL) dives deep into the world’s advanced datacenter and AI hardware. To learn more about our pipeline or to commission a teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. We’re hiring technical experts from system to transistor and everywhere in between. Check out our Careers page. Panther Lake offers scalability and modularity through its disaggregated packaging that partition compute, GPU, and I/O silicon into separate tiles allowing for a suite of tile configurations. This partitioning makes the package part of Intel’s node economics as it determines how much leading-edge wafer area each product consumes, which functions can remain on other processes, and how much configuration freedom Intel can offer from a shared set of tiles. Furthermore, fabricating the compute and GPU tiles separately confines the new 18A process to the compute tile and allows graphics and I/O to use other, more established, and more cost-effective processes. For Panther Lake, the GPU and I/O tiles are assembled alongside the compute tile on a passive silicon base using Foveros-S. Intel’s current technology brief lists a nominal 36 µm pitch for Foveros-S. Through-silicon vias (TSVs) in the base connect the fine wiring above to the larger package connections below. The functional tiles sit side by side on that passive base in a 2.5D configuration. [39] Our cross-section through the compute and GPU tiles shows the package’s wiring hierarchy. Microbumps connect each active tile to the passive silicon base; its fine redistribution layer (RDL) carries the short, dense tile-to-tile links. TSVs carry connections through the base to the package substrate, which fans them out to the much coarser motherboard solder joints. The base supplies interconnect, while computation remains in the active tiles above it. [39] At the compute-tile edge, the higher-magnification inset shows a local microbump spacing of approximately 25.24 µm and a feature width of 12.33 µm. These local spacings are finer than Intel’s nominal Foveros-S value. The X-ray fields further confirm tighter neighboring bumps, consistent across every die-to-die area found on each tile. Additional X-ray analysis is offered after the paywall. Putting the memory controller beside the CPU removes the D2D transfer that CPU memory requests required in Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake. This avoids the extra transmitter, receiver, and link traversal, saving interface energy and latency. Panther Lake’s separate GPU still crosses a D2D link to reach DRAM, so its larger local caches also help contain package traffic. [1], [40] Smaller dies are less likely to contain a random fatal defect, and screening them before assembly prevents one bad tile from consuming a complete package of good silicon. Reuse also spreads design and qualification work across more products. Against those gains, Intel pays for the passive base, D2D circuits, extra bonding and test steps, and losses during assembly. Cost per working product across the portfolio captures the combined effect of wafer yield, reuse, test, and assembly. [29] Wildcat Lake packaging Intel launched Core Series 3, formerly Wildcat Lake, on 16 April 2026 for value mobile and edge systems. Wildcat Lake keeps 18A but removes the passive base and combines more functions on one die to simplify the package. The two products therefore reveal two distinct ways to commercialize the same leading-edge process. [41] Wildcat Lake’s 18A die combines up to two Cougar Cove P-cores, four Darkmont LP E-cores, two Xe3 cores and a smaller NPU. A separate platform-controller die supplies I/O, connected through UCIe, Intel’s first processor implementation of the standard. Consolidating graphics remove a tile boundary and the passive base, reducing assembly complexity for a modest-bandwidth value product. It also ties CPU and graphics scaling to the same die, giving up Panther Lake’s ability to swap in a much larger GPU. [42], [43] In July 2021, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger set out an ambitious process roadmap aimed at regaining performance leadership by 2025, later described as five nodes in four years. Five years and one CEO later, Intel’s comeback story is not as unambiguously positive as Pat may have hoped. [44], [45] Intel once set the pace for process technology, bringing high-k metal gate technology and FinFETs into volume production years ahead of the rest of the industry. Its 22 nm FinFET process reached consumers with Ivy Bridge in 2012. [46] Intel’s integrated device manufacturing (IDM) model allowed its architects and process engineers to co-optimize products and processes. Starting with Sandy Bridge, Intel dominated x86, while AMD struggled with Bulldozer. That lead faltered at 14 nm and broke at 10 nm. Intel targeted a massive 2.7× density increase, but the node arrived years late and required several revisions before it could support Intel’s full lineup. This delay forced Intel to stretch 14 nm across six generations, while TSMC moved ahead in process technology and AMD recovered in x86. By 2019, Intel was still shipping 14 nm across most of its product stack, with its 10 nm client ramp focused on Ice Lake mobile processors. Meanwhile, TSMC was shipping N7 and N7+, and AMD’s Zen 2 compute chiplets used N7 to raise core counts and improve efficiency. Intel’s process failures were central to its decline, but unsound business decisions furthered their downward slide. Product delays compounded product mistakes, pushing client, server, and FPGA roadmaps off schedule. Several attempts to enter AI (Nervana and Gaudi) and networking (Tofino) also failed to establish lasting businesses. Intel’s recovery has focused on consumer CPUs and advanced packaging. Tiger Lake, Alder Lake, Lunar Lake and now Panther Lake have restored Intel’s consumer roadmap. On the process side, Intel 4 shipped with Meteor Lake, Intel 3 with Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest, and Intel 18A with Panther Lake. Intel has also made advanced packaging part of its foundry offering. However, Intel is still playing catch-up in servers. Several Xeon generations arrived years late and trailed contemporary AMD and Arm server CPUs in performance, efficiency, and core count. The process roadmap is back, but Intel does not hold the same process-technology leadership position it held prior to 10 nm. The introduction of gate-all-around nanosheets and backside power delivery are two of the biggest changes to transistor integration in a decade. Intel took on both changes at once: 18A paired its first RibbonFET with PowerVia in Panther Lake. Panther Lake is a substantial manufacturing milestone. Our cross-sections show how RibbonFET and PowerVia reshape local contacts and wiring, while the floorplans show where architectural consolidation and process choices save area. A sustained competitive lead depends on product performance, cost, yield, and the next implementation. The SemiAnalysis STEEL teardown lab breaks down advanced datacenter and AI hardware. To learn more about our pipeline or to commission a teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. WE’RE HIRING: Architecture, floorplan, packaging, manufacturing, and labs experts. Opportunities from system to transistor and everywhere in between. Check out our Careers page.. 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Sep 26 • 9:36 AM EDT • Technology • newsletter.semianalysis.com

A massive asteroid slammed into the North Sea and unleashed a 330-foot tsunami

A decades-long mystery beneath the North Sea has finally been solved. Scientists have confirmed that the Silverpit Crater, buried 700 meters below the seabed, was created when a 160-meter-wide asteroid struck Earth roughly 43 to 46 million years ago. The violent collision blasted a towering curtain of rock and water 1.5 kilometers into the air and triggered a tsunami more than 100 meters high.

Oct 20 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

'Completely Transformed My Understanding': Scientists Uncover Hundreds of Hidden Structures Beneath The Amazon

A society of millions.

Jul 29 • 11:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencealert.com

Scientists Discover More Than 1,000 Fish Nests Hiding Beneath Antarctica's Ice

"Critical evidence of unique, structured breeding habitats."

Aug 2 • 9:37 PM EDT • Science • sciencealert.com

This mysterious hole on the Moon may open into a giant cave

NASA has selected the GIMLI project to investigate whether the Marius Hill Pit opens into a vast underground cave or lava tube. Using radar, seismic sensors, gravity measurements, and cameras, researchers will search beneath the lunar surface and estimate the size of any hidden void. Such caves could preserve clues to the Moon’s volcanic history and potentially provide protected shelters for future astronauts.

Oct 4 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Scientists in China Test Solar Panels That Work Underwater 10 Meters Beneath the Sea

The cells exploit the narrow slice of sunlight that survives beneath the sea.

Sep 11 • 11:00 AM EDT • Science • zmescience.com

Critical Public Health: Fiscal Reform Under the “One Big Beautiful Bill” and It’s Public Health Implications

The ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ is framed by its proponents as the largest middle-class tax cut in U.S. history and a catalyst for economic growth. Yet, beneath the marketing of ‘jobs, tax cuts, and American prosperity’, the legislation conceals sweeping rollbacks of Medicaid, food assistance, education, reproductive care, and expanded immigration enforcement, alongside tax windfalls for venture capital and immigration enforcement.

Sep 4 • 10:45 AM EDT • Health • itep.org

Sapphire discovery could reshape future brain-inspired electronics

Using X-ray beams from Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source, researchers discovered that a substrate beneath a vanadium dioxide film is not just a passive host. Data reveal mutual interactions that could shape future low-power, brain-inspired computing.

Oct 1 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • anl.gov

A colossal magma system has been hiding beneath Tuscany

A massive magma reservoir has been detected deep beneath Tuscany, despite showing no obvious signs at the surface. Scientists mapped the roughly 6,000-cubic-kilometer body using natural ground vibrations recorded by dozens of seismic sensors. It poses no immediate danger, but the discovery reveals how enormous volcanic systems can remain hidden and could transform the search for geothermal energy and critical minerals.

Aug 4 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Scientists Put Sensors on Narwhals. They Revealed Something Troubling Beneath Greenland's Glaciers

Unwitting research assistants.

Sep 1 • 4:00 PM EDT • Science • yahoo.com

America’s water infrastructure is reaching its breaking point

U.S. water infrastructure is facing a growing convergence of aging systems, extreme weather, cybersecurity threats and rising costs, putting essential utilities under increasing financial and operational pressure, Bloomberg reports. The problem was highlighted this summer when a water main installed in 1916 ruptured beneath West Hollywood during a heat wave, releasing 17 million gallons of […]

Sep 10 • 10:36 AM EDT • Business • businessreport.com

Scientists poured pink dye into Florida’s Lake Jackson to trace hidden water; about 1 month later, it appeared at Wakulla Spring through limestone caves

A dye was injected into a sinkhole beneath Florida's Lake Jackson and took about five weeks to reach Wakulla Spring, which was evidence that water can move between the two sites through the underground limestone aquifer. The lake is about 19 miles north of Wakulla Spring, and researchers detected distinctive Rhodamine WT dye signals at the spring 35 days after the injection, according to a 2024 study in the Journal of Cave and Karst Science.

Sep 5 • 9:20 AM EDT • Science • timesofindia.indiatimes.com

There’s a Vast Network Beneath Your Feet—And It Could Be Conscious, Some Theories Claim

It’s so large that it could stretch from the sun to Pluto an unfathomable number of times.

Aug 15 • 9:00 AM EDT • Science • popularmechanics.com

Overnight Science News from deep beneath our feet to light years beyond our heads

This week’s science story collection begins with a spectacular consequence of the “super” El Niño and ends with a study that found a means of extending fruit fly lifespans, but don’t tell the…

Sep 26 • 11:58 PM EDT • Science • dailykos.com

He Was Known As A Simple Man In The Neighborhood, But Behind His Doors Lay Thousands Of Remains And Ledgers Of Names

For decades, Andrés Mendoza was regarded as a quiet, helpful neighbor. Beneath his home, investigators found thousands of bone fragments and ledgers documenting a homicide spree of dozens of women.

Sep 18 • 9:53 PM EDT • Technology • boredpanda.com

Take a break from opinion-page politics next week

Sometimes I think I’d take tornado season over election season. And that strikes me as an apt comparison as I imagine sheltering beneath a hinged cellar door until the storm has blown over — physically in one sense, mentally in the other. As an example of the debris flying around this season, my inbox was

Oct 21 • 11:59 AM EDT • Politics • decorahleader.com

A Man Was Scrolling Google Maps—Then He Noticed Google Maps Staring Back at Him

The physical forces beneath this eerie floating “eye” in Argentina are even stranger than the shape itself.

Oct 14 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • popularmechanics.com

Newcastle Creates New Senior Role After Major Recruiting Changes

Newcastle United’s football operation has undergone significant change over the past year, with Ross Wilson overseeing another stage of the club’s restructuring following the departures of experienced figures including Steve Nickson and Andy Howe. Jack Ross has now confirmed that he has become Newcastle’s Assistant Sporting Director, effectively placing him directly beneath Wilson in the […]

Sep 28 • 9:00 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Red lights are flashing in energy markets

Oil prices are once again uncomfortably high, but the bigger problem is lurking just beneath the surface.

Aug 19 • 5:00 AM EDT • Business • cnn.com

Legacy Business Alliance honors historic Evanston businesses at 3rd annual celebration

Mingling beneath a full suit of armor and a stuffed antelope head, a who’s who of Evanston politicos and business owners gathered at the Evanston History Center on Thursday evening to toast the city’s historic small businesses. The occasion marked the Evanston Legacy Business Alliance’s third annual celebration. Ald. Clare Kelly (1st) and Carl Klein,...

Oct 16 • 2:36 AM EDT • Business • dailynorthwestern.com

Australia’s red soil may be hiding a massive clean energy source

Researchers have discovered that Western Australia’s iron-rich rocks can naturally generate hydrogen and that the process may be boosted to produce much larger amounts. If it can be scaled up, the vast formations beneath the Pilbara could become a major new source of low-emission energy for Australia and potentially the world.

Aug 28 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Science at the edge of the ice

Researchers returned to Milne Fiord year after year to monitor its ice shelf and the freshwater lake beneath the ice. Their measurements ultimately helped reconstruct how Canada’s last epishelf lake disappeared following the ice shelf’s 2020 breakup.

Sep 10 • 9:55 AM EDT • Science • news.ubc.ca

There's a hidden world beneath Ontario's rivers — and it's disappearing

Scientists are uncovering the creatures that live in our rivers with techniques like electrofishing and DNA sampling. Here's what they're finding, from mottled sculpins to mayfly nymphs, and why they say we need to know our underwater neighbours.

Aug 9 • 4:00 AM EDT • Science • cbc.ca

Scientists found an estimated 5.5 million wild bees beneath just 1.5 acres of a New York cemetery, more than three times Manhattan's human population

Beneath the quiet lawns and weathered headstones of a small cemetery in Ithaca, New York, scientists have uncovered one of the most astonishing bee discoveries in recent memory. In a carefully studied 1.5-acre section of the cemetery grounds, researchers estimated that about 5.5 million wild, ground-nesting bees live in a dense network of underground nests.

Sep 7 • 6:31 AM EDT • Science • timesofindia.indiatimes.com

What Lies Beneath: The Shocking Truth About Carbon Hidden Underground - Futura-Sciences

The Surprising Underground Wilderness This fall, many of us will stroll through forests in search of that elusive perfect mushroom for dinner. But researchers at the University of Michigan (United States) have gone a fair bit further—and deeper. For the very first time, they succeeded in quantifying the abundance of...

Aug 8 • 7:00 PM EDT • Science • futura-sciences.com

Scientists found an estimated 5.5 million wild bees living beneath a New York cemetery — millions of solitary insects packed into underground burrows across just 1.5 acres, creating one of the largest nesting aggregations ever recorded at a site where the species has quietly survived for generations

A shortcut through a graveyard revealed millions of bees living invisibly beneath New York soil—a discovery that rewrites what scientists thought possible about solitary insect colonies.

Sep 6 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • spacedaily.com

In 1996, NOAA scientists pumped 2 dyes beneath Key Largo to learn where groundwater went; 18 days later, 2 bay-side wells showed it flowed toward the Atlantic

By the mid-1990s, seagrass die-offs and deteriorating water quality had caused coral reefs throughout the Florida Keys to show signs of decline for years, leading scientists to search for explanations other than the apparent ones like boat traffic and coastal development. One notion that kept coming up among academics investigating the region was that contaminants and nutrients could be carried directly into the reef tract by groundwater seeping silently beneath the islands, where no one could witness it.

Sep 12 • 9:00 AM EDT • Science • timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Sponsored: Marin packs one weekend with endless entertainment

Your weekend plans just got a whole lot busier! Marin County is packed with ways to get out and explore — from an iconic arts festival beneath the redwoods to authentic Oktoberfest celebrations and…

Sep 15 • 7:51 PM EDT • Entertainment • kron4.com

Scientists map massive layer of life just beneath our feet

Until recently, nobody had visualized the fungal "Wood Wide Web."

Sep 14 • 5:09 PM EDT • Science • bigthink.com

Crowds line up for teamLab’s debut at the Smart

Black, inky lines writhe slowly like jellyfish beneath a golden sea in teamLab’s “Sea of Darkness, Memory Shining From the Depths,” a standout new piece now on view at the

Oct 5 • 4:00 PM EDT • Entertainment • hpherald.com

Hundreds of hidden earthquakes found at Antarctica’s Doomsday Glacier

Hundreds of previously overlooked seismic events have been detected beneath Antarctica, including 245 near the marine edge of the Thwaites Glacier. Many appear to be glacial earthquakes caused when huge icebergs break off, capsize, and collide with the glacier. The surge in activity coincided with a period when Thwaites was flowing faster toward the ocean, hinting that changing ocean conditions may be destabilizing the ice.

Aug 30 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Scientists simulate cosmic crashes to test whether icy moons gain or lose their ability to sustain life

Many of the moons orbiting Saturn, Uranus and Neptune likely conceal oceans of liquid water beneath miles of icy shell. Because life as we know it needs water, these buried oceans rank among the most ...

Sep 19 • 7:00 AM EDT • Science • phys.org

Scientists Put Sensors on Narwhals. They Revealed Something Troubling Beneath Greenland's Glaciers

Unwitting research assistants.

Sep 1 • 4:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencealert.com

Scientists mapped beneath Utah’s Great Salt Lake and found a potentially vast reservoir of freshwater hiding under one of America’s saltiest lakes — in places, it extends more than three kilometres underground

Reeds do not grow on salt flats. Yet dozens of near-perfect circles of them have shoved their way up through the crust of Farmington Bay, in the

Sep 6 • 5:15 AM EDT • Science • scienceblog.com

Seven new frog species were hiding beneath Madagascar’s forest floor

Scientists have discovered seven new species of Madagascar’s elusive diamond frogs, using DNA from modern and century-old museum specimens to solve a long-running biological puzzle. The findings reveal surprising hidden diversity and could help protect these little-known amphibians as their forest habitats disappear.

Aug 29 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Earth Tearing Apart Beneath Pacific Northwest

TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Scientists have captured an unusually detailed view of a major tectonic system beneath the Pacific Northwest beginning to come apart.

Sep 25 • 8:49 AM EDT • Science • tasnimnews.ir

Earth Science Week at Museum Features Fossils, Minerals, Maps, and More

Credit: CourtesyCredit: CourtesyCredit: CourtesyCredit: Courtesy SANTA BARBARA, CA—The Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History is celebrating National

Oct 2 • 5:54 PM EDT • Science • independent.com

What Kills Schrödinger’s Cat? Scientists Just Ruled Out a 60-Year-Old Theory

Gravity has been proposed as a reason quantum superpositions become difficult to observe in everyday objects. A new experiment challenges one longstanding model of this process. A detector buried deep beneath an Italian mountain has challenged a decades-old theory about why quantum behavior disappears from the world we experience. After 62 days of measurements, researchers

Oct 19 • 5:51 AM EDT • Science • scitechdaily.com

Human Urine and Fuel Are Melting the Glacier Beneath Everest Base Camp

Everest’s seasonal city produces enough heat to melt thousands of tons of ice.

Sep 4 • 2:00 AM EDT • Science • zmescience.com

Moonquakes could reveal hidden water beneath the lunar surface

Hidden moon ice may reveal itself through the way it bends and reflects vibrations from moonquakes. The technique could help astronauts locate vital water supplies and uncover clues about the origins of Earth’s oceans.

Aug 3 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Scientists hunt for dark matter deep underground

A SLAC-led experiment more than a mile beneath a Canadian mine has begun collecting early scientific data ahead

Sep 15 • 3:30 AM EDT • Science • technology.org

Docktober invites folks to join citizen scientists in peeking under docks

Oregon naturalist leads the global Docktober movement, encouraging citizen scientists to discover and document the marine life thriving beneath public docks.

Oct 20 • 9:00 AM EDT • Science • klcc.org

A ‘devil flower’ with no leaves, no branches, no green part has been discovered in a Thai forest, scientists say its bizarre appearance is hiding an even stranger secret

It has no leaves, no branches and no green parts, and spends much of its life concealed beneath fallen leaves on the forest floor. Scientists have now described a bizarre new flowering plant from Thailand, naming it Thismia daemona, the “devil flower”, for its dark, horn-like appearance.

Sep 5 • 12:30 AM EDT • Science • timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Scientists hunt for dark matter deep underground

A SLAC-led experiment more than a mile beneath a Canadian mine has begun collecting early scientific data ahead of a full-sensitivity search next year.

Aug 26 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • news.stanford.edu

Old friends, fierce rivals play at 95th New York State horseshoe championship in Camden

Nestled beneath the trees in southern Camden, the game of horseshoes is alive and well at the Pine Grove Horseshoe Club on Route 13. The club hosted the 95th annual New York State Horseshoe Pitcher's State Championship Tournament this past weekend, where pitchers from all across the state gathered to find the best of the best.

Sep 5 • 6:00 PM EDT • Entertainment • romesentinel.com

In January 2026, researchers completed a drilling project beneath 1,716 feet of ice in West Antarctica, recovering evidence of an ocean that once lay open to sunlight

The discovery rewrites Antarctica's climate history—and raises urgent questions about how quickly ice sheets can collapse.

Sep 19 • 1:00 PM EDT • Science • scienceblog.com

Salt crystals could hold clues to life beneath Enceladus's ice

The ocean beneath Saturn's moon Enceladus lies under kilometers of ice, but some of its contents do reach the surface. Jets near the south pole spray out water vapor and icy particles, offering a way ...

Oct 17 • 11:40 AM EDT • Science • phys.org

As Xi Leaves Washington, Divisions Still Simmer Beneath the Surface

President Trump welcomed Xi Jinping of China for a state visit that was heavy on pomp and ceremony. But surprisingly little time was spent on the issues that most divide the two superpowers.

Sep 25 • 5:35 PM EDT • Politics • nytimes.com

Tahoe TAP Podcast — The Science Behind Lake Tahoe with Dr. Stephanie Hampton – UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center

Lake Tahoe is one of the most studied lakes in the world, and understanding what’s happening beneath its famously clear surface is critical to protecting its future. On this episode of Tahoe TAP, hosts Mike...

Sep 1 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • tahoedailytribune.com

Why you should check the ingredients of your açaí bowl

Beneath all that fruit and crunchy granola, are açaí bowls actually as healthy as they seem? Here's what to know.

Aug 23 • 7:00 AM EDT • Health • usatoday.com

Science meets art beneath the sea in Phoenix's latest immersive experience

Dive beneath the waves in Phoenix! Sounds of the Ocean is a 47-min immersive experience of marine life, whale songs & ocean art at the Dorrance DOME.

Aug 13 • 12:39 PM EDT • Science • azfamily.com

Drilling Accidentally Created a Methane Leak Beneath The South China Sea. Within a Year, Animals Helped 'Plug' It.

Thank you, nature.

Sep 7 • 4:00 PM EDT • Science • yahoo.com

The next Cascadia megaquake could hit Oregon harder than expected

The Juan de Fuca plate beneath northern Oregon appears to be shallower than previously estimated, potentially making shaking from a future Cascadia megathrust earthquake significantly stronger. Scientists also found a deep basin beneath Tillamook that could trap seismic waves and intensify the shaking even further.

Aug 29 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Conectando Dreamers: The Three Cities of Ross Mintzer

A bright red full moon hung low over Nahuel Huapi Lake one night in 2026, as hundreds gathered beneath Patagonia’s stars for the second Conectando Dreamers festival in San Carlos de Bariloche, Argenti...

Sep 20 • 10:45 AM EDT • Entertainment • yahoo.com

Uncovering the Valleys Hidden Below Greenland’s Ice

A new map of the terrain beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet links hundreds of valleys that previous maps missed or left fragmented.

Sep 28 • 12:00 AM EDT • Science • science.nasa.gov

In 2009, Scientists Drilled 183 Meters Beneath An Antarctic Ice Shelf And Found A Surprising Lifeform

Sometimes when you gaze into the abyss, something really does gaze back.

Aug 1 • 5:00 AM EDT • Science • iflscience.com

A university professor spent 100 days living in a 100-square-foot habitat 22 feet beneath a Key Largo lagoon — and when he finally surfaced, he measured half an inch shorter after spending the entire mission under elevated pressure

Joseph Dituri went into the water at 73 inches tall. He came out, 100 days later, at just over 72. The final measurement came on a Key Largo dock in June

Sep 8 • 6:15 AM EDT • Science • scienceblog.com

Scientists overturned hundreds of rocks in Barbados and finally found the world's smallest snake after 20 years

After nearly 20 years without a confirmed sighting, scientists in Barbados have finally rediscovered the world’s smallest-known snake. According to the Associated Press, the tiny Barbados threadsnake was found beneath a rock during an ecological survey in central Barbados, bringing an end to a search that had seen researchers turn over hundreds of rocks in the hope of finding the elusive reptile.

Aug 24 • 6:00 AM EDT • Science • timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Beneath a field of loose rubble on Utah’s Mount Timpanogos, scientists mapped a hidden mass of ice up to 150 feet thick — enough frozen water to fill 600 Olympic swimming pools

Massive ice deposits hidden beneath Utah mountain rubble could reshape understanding of water resources and climate patterns in the American West.

Sep 9 • 8:45 AM EDT • Science • scienceblog.com

New Iberia’s Beneath the Balconies brings live performances, dancing to Main Street

Organizers say the event is about more than entertainment, but also an opportunity to bring visitors into New Iberia when they otherwise wouldn’t have.

Sep 27 • 8:00 AM EDT • Entertainment • theadvocate.com

Scientists Say They've Found Remnants of Huge Life-Giving Continent Beneath Antarctica

Antarctica may be hiding many of the remnants of Himalaya-scale mountains that once allowed life to flourish underneath its coat of ice.

Sep 26 • 10:02 AM EDT • Science • futurism.com

McKinley’s assassination and the growing distance between politicians and the public

At 4 p.m. on the afternoon of Sept. 6, 1901, the doors of the Temple of Music in Buffalo, N.Y., swung open and the public began filing past the president of the United States. An organist played Bach. William McKinley stood beneath a blue-and-gold dome, smiling and extending his hand to anyone who wished to take it.

Sep 6 • 3:15 AM EDT • Politics • arkansasonline.com

How Enceladus' ocean spray becomes chemically diverse ice grains

Saturn's icy moon Enceladus hides a global ocean beneath its frozen surface. From fractures near its south pole, material from this ocean is ejected into space as a plume of water vapor and ice particles. ...

Oct 4 • 12:00 PM EDT • Science • phys.org

Student Artists Produce Themed Mural for Department of Political Science

On the surface, the Lane Room Mural is simply a new painting on an old wall. But beneath the vibrancy and impressive scale of the work is a story of art

Oct 13 • 3:48 PM EDT • Science • noozhawk.com

Earth’s molten core suddenly reversed direction — and scientists don’t know why

Earth’s molten iron core unexpectedly reversed direction beneath the Pacific, revealing a dramatic change in the hidden engine that creates our planet’s magnetic field. Satellite data suggest the surge is already weakening, raising the possibility that the deep-Earth upheaval is part of a mysterious natural cycle.

Aug 6 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

In 1942, scientists stacked roughly 45,000 graphite blocks beneath the stands of a Chicago football stadium and started the world’s first nuclear reactor — while one physicist waited nearby with an axe, ready to cut a rope and drop an emergency rod if the reaction ran out of control

The architect of the atomic age had no emergency button, no computer failsafe—just a physicist with an axe and steady nerves standing between Chicago and catastrophe.

Sep 8 • 5:45 AM EDT • Science • scienceblog.com

Dive Beneath the Surface in Grounded 2's Biggest Update Yet: Into the Abyss

Take the plunge today as Grounded 2's largest content update yet, Into the Abyss, opens an expansive new underwater adventure.

Aug 11 • 1:00 PM EDT • Technology • news.xbox.com

Beneath Tunisia’s silence, public anger simmers

Aug 1 • 5:42 AM EDT • Politics • aljazeera.com

What Happens to Your Brain During Anesthesia? Scientists Are Still Searching for Answers

There is a strange kind of trust involved in going under general anesthesia. One moment you are answering a nurse’s questions beneath bright operating room lights. Then, seemingly seconds later, hours...

Sep 27 • 11:16 AM EDT • Science • yahoo.com

In 2007, scientists used NASA satellite measurements to reveal 14 areas of moving water beneath West Antarctica; one hidden lake had drained about 2 cubic kilometres in three years

Antarctica may look like a vast, frozen and unchanging landscape, but deep beneath its thick ice lies a surprisingly active world. In 2007, scientists reported findings based on measurements collected by NASA’s ICESat satellite between 2003 and 2006, revealing major changes in the surface of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and signs of water moving through hidden lakes far below.

Aug 25 • 12:37 AM EDT • Science • timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Drilling Accidentally Created a Methane Leak Beneath The South China Sea. Within a Year, Animals Helped 'Plug' It.

Thank you, nature.

Sep 7 • 4:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencealert.com

NASA’s New Horizons spots signs of liquid nitrogen flowing on Pluto

Scientists have found the first evidence that liquid may have flowed across Pluto’s surface in the recent past. Dark features on the enormous Sputnik Planitia glacier appear consistent with liquid nitrogen rising through cracks from deep beneath the ice. Computer models show that nitrogen could melt at the glacier’s base and travel upward like fluid through small conduits. The finding reveals that Pluto may be much more geologically active than its frozen appearance suggests.

Sep 16 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Canadian PM tells Trump to 'stop trying to be tough' in trade fight

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney told Americans to "stop trying to be tough" and called U.S. Cabinet secretaries' mockery "beneath their office."

Sep 2 • 9:05 AM EDT • Politics • foxnews.com

Earth's crust is 'unzipping' beneath Italy — and that could explain most of the earthquakes in the region

The peeling away of Earth's crust beneath Italy may explain a lot of the seismic activity in the mountains that run along the spine of the country.

Sep 23 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • livescience.com

Hidden Megacities Discovered Beneath Amazon Jungle: Scientists Stunned by Scale - Futura-Sciences

Millennia-Old Urban Networks Revealed by Modern Science It turns out, the Amazon wasn’t always the wild jungle we picture today. Between around 600 BCE and 850 CE, a civilization known as the Aquiry dramatically transformed large parts of the southwestern Amazon Basin. These people dug colossal ditches and geometric earthworks,...

Sep 17 • 3:00 PM EDT • Science • futura-sciences.com

Scientists thought Titan was hiding a global ocean beneath its frozen crust. But a 2025 reanalysis of Cassini data points to something stranger instead — a roughly 380-kilometre-thick layer of slushy ice, close to melting and likely threaded with pockets of liquid water that could reach 20°C near the rocky interior.

A 2025 Cassini reanalysis measures a tidal lag that favors a warm, partly melted high-pressure ice layer over Titan's long-assumed global ocean.

Aug 14 • 1:30 PM EDT • Science • scienceblog.com

In 1903, a mining engineer staked a claim on Arizona's Meteor Crater, convinced a fortune in iron lay beneath the floor, and spent 26 years drilling for a meteorite that had mostly vaporized on impact — his family still owns the crater today, and science later proved him right about everything except the treasure

A wealthy engineer bet his fortune on a hole in the ground that science said was worthless, and spent three decades proving the experts catastrophically wrong.

Sep 12 • 9:44 PM EDT • Science • spacedaily.com

Scientists who read 16 years of radio tracking from three Mars orbiters say the mantle beneath the planet's southern highlands runs 200 to 400 degrees Celsius hotter, averaged over the whole depth of the mantle, than the mantle beneath the northern plains, an inference drawn from the way Mars flexes under the Sun across each Martian year

The tracking shows Mars deforming in a way a uniform planet should not, and the least strained explanation is a hemisphere of mantle that something is still keeping warm.

Sep 5 • 2:00 AM EDT • Science • scienceblog.com

Something Deep Inside the Earth Is Messing With Time—and Making Days Longer Than 24 Hours

A hidden battle of torques 3,000 miles beneath your feet decides whether today runs long or short.

Oct 2 • 9:00 AM EDT • Science • popularmechanics.com

Giant caves beneath sinkhole reveal origin of mystery trenches that score Australia's Nullarbor Plain

When giant systems of ancient caves far below the surface of Australia collapsed, it left distinctive clues at the surface.

Sep 22 • 10:12 AM EDT • Science • livescience.com

Researchers Discover a Green Hydrogen 'Goldmine' Beneath Australia's Red Dirt

"Could be transformative for our energy future."

Sep 12 • 10:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencealert.com

Earth is tearing apart beneath the Pacific Northwest

Scientists have captured a subduction zone off Vancouver Island in the process of tearing itself apart, revealing that these massive tectonic systems may die piece by piece rather than all at once. The discovery could help explain ancient plate fragments, volcanic activity, and how hidden breaks beneath Cascadia may influence future earthquakes.

Sep 25 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Vast hidden ocean beneath Earth’s mantle? Scientists stunned by new discovery - Futura-Sciences

Water: More Than Lakes and Oceans When we talk about water on Earth, we tend to picture oceans, lakes, rivers, and underground aquifers. But water also lurks less obviously in our atmosphere as vapor, and even deeper within the minerals that make up both the crust and the mantle of...

Sep 19 • 7:00 AM EDT • Science • futura-sciences.com

He washed dishes beneath BlackRock’s headquarters, landed his dream job there—then quit to build his family’s restaurant empire

Anthony Scotto III traded corporate security for seven-day workweeks, hundreds of employees, and a rapidly expanding family business.

Sep 26 • 4:00 AM EDT • Business • fortune.com

1,700-year-old church discovered under a lake in Turkey may be the location of the First Council of Nicaea

A small church discovered beneath a larger one may have hosted one of the most important meetings in the history of Christianity, but some scholars not involved with the excavation disagree.

Aug 17 • 11:00 AM EDT • Science • livescience.com

The Country Beneath the Political Noise

Politics may be at the center of public life, but it doesn’t make up the core of who we are.

Sep 27 • 6:30 AM EDT • Politics • nationalreview.com

'Unique Refuge': A Lost Sea May Still Be Alive Beneath Antarctica's Eerie Blood Falls

An ancient ecosystem living in the dark.

Aug 3 • 11:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencealert.com

The science of aging skin: What to expect, decade by decade

Aging is something we can see in the mirror, but many of the biggest changes are happening beneath the surface of the skin. Collagen production slows, cell turnover changes, moisture

Sep 17 • 1:26 PM EDT • Science • bozemandailychronicle.com

Mars’ North Polar Ice Is Much Cleaner Than Scientists Thought

Beneath the dusty surface of Mars’ north pole, scientists have uncovered surprisingly clean layers of ice that may preserve a hidden record of the planet’s dramatic climate history. Earth maintains a relatively steady posture in space thanks to the gravitational anchor of a massive moon. Mars lacks that stability. Tugged only by two tiny moons,

Oct 2 • 3:06 PM EDT • Science • scitechdaily.com

Trees are connected by fungal threads beneath the soil, trading carbon and chemical signals in ways scientists are still arguing over — including whether a dying tree can pass part of itself into the forest before it goes

Beneath the forest floor, trees may be trading resources and secrets through fungal networks—but scientists are still feuding over how the system actually works.

Aug 22 • 7:45 AM EDT • Science • spacedaily.com

iPhone Duo 2 Prototypes Include Under-Display Face ID

Apple's second-generation iPhone Duo could gain Face ID, with prototypes already incorporating the technology beneath the outer display, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. In the latest episode of his "Power On" podcast, Gurman described Apple's work on adding facial authentication technology to its foldable iPhone. The company is said to be testing the hardware for a successor expected next fall, but has not finalized whether the feature will ship.

Oct 22 • 6:46 AM EDT • Technology • macrumors.com

Scientists find evidence for an ancient supercontinent that covered 80 percent of Earth’s surface

Isotope mapping reveals millions of square kilometers of lost Gondwanan crust hidden beneath Asia, Europe and North America.

Sep 13 • 7:07 PM EDT • Science • thebrighterside.news

Antwone Fisher to Present Author Talk at Chaucer's

Antoine Fisher Chaucer's Books will host New York Times bestselling author Antwone Fisher (“Finding Fish”) for a talk and signing of "Reflections Beneath

Aug 23 • 12:00 PM EDT • Entertainment • noozhawk.com