Science & Engineering
The ocean produces roughly half of the oxygen humans breathe
Tiny ocean drifters produce half the air you breathe, yet remain almost completely invisible to human attention or concern.
Science & Engineering
How does a fish live eight kilometres beneath the surface, under pressure equal to…
Evolution has engineered a creature that shouldn't exist—a fish that thrives in conditions that would pulverize almost any other organism on Earth.
Science & Engineering
Ingenuity was funded as a technology demonstration with five flights and a…
A five-flight proof-of-concept built from phone parts became the first aircraft to conquer another world—until a single rotor tip ended its seventy-two-flight reign.
Science & Engineering
How does a planet 95 times the mass of Earth end up light enough to float on water?
The gas giant's vast bulk conceals a secret: spread that enormous mass across enough space, and it becomes lighter than water.
Science & Engineering
The Parker Solar Probe flies through the sun's outer atmosphere behind a carbon…
A spacecraft no thicker than a hardcover book keeps its instruments cool enough for humans while the sun tries to incinerate it at 1,400 degrees.
Science & Engineering
How does a lake the size of Lake Ontario stay liquid under four kilometres of…
Sealed beneath Antarctic ice for millions of years, a hidden ocean-sized lake challenges our understanding of life's limits and Earth's hidden frontiers.
Science & Engineering
On 1 September 1859 a solar storm hit Earth hard enough that auroras were seen over…
When Earth's magnetic shield nearly failed, telegraph operators accidentally discovered they could send messages on pure solar wind.
Science & Engineering
The software that landed men on the Moon was not loaded onto the Apollo Guidance…
The Apollo Guidance Computer's most critical code wasn't programmed—it was hand-woven by women threading copper wire through thousands of magnetic rings, one pass at a time.
Universe
A Soviet probe built in 1972 to land on Venus returned to Earth on 10 May 2025, and…
A spacecraft built to withstand Venus's hellish surface may have survived its accidental journey home, raising the tantalizing possibility that humanity's oldest lost probe just returned itself to Earth.
Science & Engineering
Opportunity was built for a ninety-day mission and a target of six hundred metres…
A robot built to last three months became a monument to human ingenuity and Martian luck—until the storm that no one could engineer away.
Universe
At least six moons in our solar system are thought to hide oceans of liquid water…
The solar system's most promising hunting grounds for extraterrestrial life may not be where we thought to look.
Science & Engineering
How does a planet spin so slowly that a single day there lasts longer than its…
The planet's surface crawls so sluggishly that its day outlasts its year—yet its upper atmosphere whips around four times faster than the surface rotates, a contradiction that has puzzled planetary scientists for decades.
Universe
Earth had life for roughly three billion years before it produced enough oxygen to…
The search for alien life relies on a cosmic red herring: Earth itself remained invisible to the very biosignatures astronomers now use to hunt for habitable worlds.
Universe
We assumed exomoons would be easy to find once we had the technology
Finding exomoons proved far harder than astronomers expected—until a tiny wobble in a brown dwarf's motion finally revealed one hiding in plain sight.
Universe
Jupiter's moon Europa hides a saltwater ocean that may contain more than twice the…
The frozen crust of Europa may be thicker than scientists hoped, potentially making any mission to reach the hidden ocean beneath even more challenging than previously thought.
Science & Engineering
How does an animal weighing less than a chocolate bar fly 13,000 kilometres across…
The tiny migrants rewire their bodies before each epic journey, pushing the limits of animal endurance in ways that challenge everything we thought possible about survival.