At 7:17 a.m. Indian Standard Time on 24 September 2014, the Mars Orbiter Mission fired its main engine and allowed Mars to capture it.
The heart is a muscle, and like any muscle, it shrinks when you ask less of it. Within days of leaving Earth, an astronaut's heart begins to lose mass —…
By the time a spacecraft's radio signal reaches Earth from the outer Solar System, it is no longer a broadcast in any everyday sense.
On 12 April 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space.
The viral estimate of 5 grams of plastic per week has been challenged, but the deeper finding is harder to argue with: nanoplastics under 200 nanometers can cross the blood-brain barrier and are now being found in human blood, placentas, and arterial plaque.
The first machine to carry a human-made clock measurably into the future was a scheduled passenger flight.
Cut the forelimb off an axolotl and it will grow another one, complete with bone, muscle, nerve and skin, in roughly six to eight weeks.
The pigeon on the windowsill is a dinosaur. Not the descendant of one. One. This is not a rhetorical flourish.
Since the FDA approved the first genetically engineered chymosin in 1990, fermentation-produced enzyme has quietly replaced calf-stomach rennet in the overwhelming majority of American hard cheese — one of the largest silent ingredient swaps in modern food history.
Neutron stars crush more mass than the Sun into a sphere the width of Manhattan, producing matter so dense a single teaspoon would weigh about four billion tonnes on Earth — the mass of a small mountain range in the volume of a sugar cube.
In 1960, South Korea was not yet the country most people picture today. It was still recovering from war, still poor, still short of capital, and still tied closely to the land.
A small stone from Northwest Africa has become evidence for a much larger absence.
The centre of Earth is easy to imagine wrongly. It is not a cavern, not a furnace of molten rock, and not a smaller version of the mantle pressed into a ball.
Leafcutter ants cannot digest the leaves they famously carry — instead they feed the clippings to an underground fungus, Leucoagaricus gongylophorus, and eat swollen nutrient-rich tips the fungus grows in return. Genomic evidence dates this farming partnership to roughly 66 million years ago, in the aftermath of the dinosaur-killing asteroid.
An octopus looks like one animal, but its nervous system is arranged more like a living network.
The glass is small enough to sit in a museum drawer, but the event it points to was not small.
