Universe
Titan has four seasons much like Earth's, but there is one very strange catch to…
The ice-locked world cycles through weather like Earth, but imagine waiting seven years for winter to end.
Universe
When the James Webb telescope peers into space, it sees not just far away but far…
The deeper into space the telescope gazes, the further back in time it travels, revealing a cosmos far younger and stranger than we imagined.
Earth & Life
Around 300 million years ago, giant dragonfly-like insects hunted over ancient…
The oxygen theory that explains giant ancient insects may have gotten the biggest part wrong.
Human Factors
Before John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth, he made one unusual…
In 1962, an astronaut preparing for humanity's most ambitious journey placed his faith in a Black mathematician with a pencil and paper, not the machines everyone else trusted.
Science & Engineering
Many scientists have won a Nobel Prize, but only one person ever pulled off what…
The myth of Marie Curie's brilliance obscures a darker truth: her achievement was less about transcendent talent than about the systemic barriers that made it nearly impossible for anyone to repeat.
Universe
In 1995 astronomers aimed Hubble at a patch of sky so dark it seemed a waste of ten…
One bold director's decision to waste Hubble's rarest resource on what looked like empty sky revealed the universe's true scale and changed astronomy forever.
Universe
Uranus is tipped so far over it does not spin like other planets so much as roll…
Uranus doesn't just experience extreme seasons—its lopsided orbit traps each pole in decades of uninterrupted darkness or light, creating weather patterns unlike anything else in the solar system.
Space & Missions
The first woman to fly in space was not a test pilot or a scientist but a young…
The Soviet Union sent a textile worker to space while America was still figuring out how to get its test pilots past the stratosphere.
Earth & Life
The 24-hour day is not fixed but slowly stretching, and in the dinosaurs' time it…
The Moon is slowly stealing Earth's rotational energy, making each day microscopically longer—a process that has been stretching time since the planet's formation and will continue long after humans are gone.
Earth & Life
Koalas are the only non-primates with true fingerprints, and theirs are so close to…
A marsupial's crime scene evidence could implicate an innocent human—a forensic nightmare born from one of evolution's strangest coincidences.
Earth & Life
The metal-rich nodules that mining firms hope to hoover off the deep-sea floor grow…
The deep-sea mining industry wants to harvest rocks that took longer to form than humans have existed on Earth.
Culture
The Great Pyramid’s exposed core can look eight-sided in raking light, but evidence…
Central grooves in the exposed core create a striking eight-sided appearance in certain light, while surviving casing and photogrammetry complicate claims of an intentional eight-faced design.
Universe
Titan may have volcanoes, but they would erupt something stranger than fire
Beneath Titan's frozen crust may lurk volcanoes that erupt not fire but icy slush, a phenomenon scientists have long suspected but never definitively proven.
Earth & Life
Sharks have no bones at all - their entire skeleton, jaws included, is built from…
This anatomical quirk—one shared by rays and skates—reveals why sharks belong to an entirely different class of fish than the ones we're more familiar with.
Universe
Saturn's moon Titan is so large it outsizes the planet Mercury, making it the…
The solar system's second-largest moon is bigger than an entire planet, yet weighs a fraction of what it appears.
Universe
Later this decade NASA plans to launch Dragonfly, a car-sized nuclear-powered drone…
A nuclear-powered drone will soon become the first aircraft to explore an alien world, searching Titan's methane seas and organic-rich dunes for signs that life might exist in the most unexpected place in our solar system.