A snapping shrimp does not need to touch what it kills. It cocks one oversized claw, holds it under tension, and releases; the claw shuts in well under a millisecond.
The finding begins at a scale easy to miss. Researchers studying dust and rock returned from the far side of the Moon by China's Chang'e-6 mission reported…
Ole Rømer was timing a moon of Jupiter to help ships find their longitude. The clock kept running slow, and the reason turned out to be the speed of light.
A 2021 experiment offered common cuttlefish an immediate snack or a wait for their favorite prey. They waited, and their patience tracked how quickly they learned.
The Soyuz 23 story is one of those spaceflight episodes that reads, at first, like a sequence of unlikely complications added one after another until the situation becomes almost absurd.
Ten out of ten. Every time Olympic women's team archery has been held, the same flag has gone up at the medal ceremony.
As Apollo 11's crew prepared to leave the Moon in July 1969, the Soviet robotic probe Luna 15 was descending toward Mare Crisium to grab soil and rush it home first. After 52 orbits it crashed, the quiet finale of the Moon race.
Satellite tags tracked a shorebird the size of a pigeon across the open Pacific in a single unbroken flight. To do it, the bird rebuilds its own body before takeoff, then flies on stored fat for more than a week.
$23 million is a big price tag for a toilet even if that figure covers two units, one for the International Space Station and one for a future Moon mission.
Salyut 7 fell silent in February 1985, tumbling and frozen. Four months later Soyuz T-13's crew docked with the dead station by hand and nursed it back to life, one of the hardest repairs ever done in orbit.
The windiest world we know of runs on almost no sunlight. Voyager 2 clocked its storms at supersonic speed during a single 1989 flyby, and scientists still cannot fully explain what powers them.
It is the first of an estimated 10,000 stellar-mass black holes thought to hide in the cluster, and the only one whose orbit has ever been traced. The catch is that the orbit is unfinished: the 94-year period rests on a partial arc, caught while the star was swinging fast past its dark partner.
A war fought in orbit will not stay between the two countries that start it. That was the blunt message Gen.
In the last hour of the final Apollo mission, Gene Cernan traced his daughter Tracy's initials into the lunar dust — and on a world without weather, they may still be legible millions of years from now.
A tank of ultrapure water a kilometer under a Japanese mountain has turned up the first statistical sign of the diffuse supernova neutrino background. It is a 2.6 sigma indication, not the confirmed detection physics still wants.
The first X-ray ever taken of a human body, in 1895, was of Wilhelm Röntgen's wife's hand, wedding ring and all.
