Most of the matter associated with galaxies is not in the stars, gas, dust, planets, or black holes that telescopes can see.
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.
The experiment sounds almost designed to fail. Take glycine, the simplest amino acid used by life on Earth.
A queen honeybee can live for one or two years on average, and occasionally several years.
The strangest thing about the smell of space is that no one can smell space directly.
The New Horizons encounter with Pluto was one of the strangest bargains in modern exploration.
On 12 April 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space.
Voyager is not loud anymore. It never really was. The spacecraft carries a transmitter with roughly the power of a household light bulb, and that signal has…
Imagine standing on a shoreline where the sea is calm, the light is the deep red of a dying ember, and the sky feels close enough to touch.
Europa looks, at first, like a frozen world that should be finished. It orbits far from the Sun, locked in the cold outer Solar System, its surface crossed by long reddish fractures and pale plains of ice.
For a long time, the most visible changes to astronauts in orbit were the obvious ones.
Earth's centre sounds like a contradiction. The inner core is hot enough to sit in the same temperature range as the visible surface of the Sun, yet it is not a liquid ocean.
The Solar System gives us a familiar catalogue of planets: small rocky worlds close to the Sun, then gas and ice giants farther out.
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.
A 2022 global census led by researchers at the University of Würzburg counted roughly 20 quadrillion ants alive on Earth at any moment — a combined dry biomass matching every wild mammal and wild bird on the planet, and moving more soil each year than Darwin's celebrated earthworms.
Antarctica receives less precipitation than the Sahara, making it a desert by definition — yet its ice sheet, averaging over two kilometres thick, holds about 70 percent of the planet's fresh water. Here's how a place that barely snows became the largest freshwater reservoir on Earth.
