Human Factors
Schoolteacher's mystery discovery on Galaxy Zoo became an astronomical object bearing her name
An amateur astronomer's casual observation became a cosmic mystery that still puzzles scientists today.
Earth & Life
Arctic town hits 38°C, shattering record for extreme heat above the Circle
A Siberian town endures temperature swings of over 100 degrees Celsius, a climatic extreme that hints at how rapidly the Arctic is transforming.
Earth & Life
Hopi farmers grow corn on a quarter of the rain that textbooks say is necessary
A crop can thrive on a quarter of the water conventional farming demands—if you've spent two millennia breeding it to.
Psychology
Barcelona's superblocks pushed cars out and cut pollution without choking nearby roads
A radical urban experiment in Barcelona defied its harshest critics—pushing cars to the edges of residential zones cut pollution and noise without strangling the surrounding streets.
Earth & Life
A mountain lion crossed two of the busiest freeways in Los Angeles around 2012 and…
One iconic cougar's impossible survival in a sprawling city became the unlikely catalyst for rethinking how wildlife moves through the urban landscape.
Universe
A river in Ohio was so thick with oil and industrial waste that it caught fire at…
National publicity—and a dramatic photograph of the river's much larger 1952 fire—turned the brief 1969 blaze into an enduring symbol of America's water-pollution crisis.
Earth & Life
Singapore's sterile mosquito program cuts dengue cases by 70 percent
A radical gamble to fight dengue—releasing millions of sterile male mosquitoes—has upended everything scientists thought they knew about disease control.
Earth & Life
Bhutan has been carbon negative for decades, far ahead of global targets
While the world promises to go carbon neutral by 2050, this Himalayan kingdom has already done it—and for decades.
Psychology
Greenwich's famous meridian line is now 100 metres off from true zero longitude
The world's most photographed meridian line has become a victim of its own success—and of modern satellite technology that has rendered it obsolete.
Earth & Life
Tourist breath is slowly dissolving the world's most famous cave stalactites
The very act of witnessing Earth's most delicate underground sculptures is imperceptibly destroying them.
Science & Engineering
Stockholm recycles data centre heat to warm 30,000 apartments
Stockholm found a way to stop wasting the enormous heat generated by data centres—and turned a climate problem into a solution for thousands of cold apartments.
Earth & Life
Pet turtles from American cartoon craze became Earth's worst invasions
A children's cartoon sparked a global trade in baby turtles that became one of nature's most destructive invasions.
Science & Engineering
Sunken subway cars became unexpected havens for Atlantic marine life
What the MTA saw as expensive garbage, ocean life transformed into thriving underwater cities.
Earth & Life
Drunk driver destroyed the only tree for 250 miles, erasing three centuries of isolation
A cartographer's paradox: the one tree so alone it warranted a spot on continental maps, until a drunk driver erased three centuries of solitude in a single night.
Earth & Life
Huskies that hauled supplies across Antarctica for decades were banished by environmental treaty
A frozen workforce that hauled supplies across Antarctica for nearly fifty years faced sudden obsolescence when environmental treaties declared their presence incompatible with the continent's protection.
Earth & Life
Escaped pet pythons have nearly wiped out Everglades mammals
A pet trade's discards have turned one of America's wildest places into a hunting ground where native mammals are vanishing almost completely.