An adult silverback gorilla builds up to 200 kilograms of body mass on a diet that is roughly 85 percent leaves — powered by hindgut fermentation that produces the same short-chain fatty acids humans absorb from oats and beans.
Voyager 1's particle detectors said it had crossed into interstellar space in August 2012, but the magnetic field refused to turn as the models required. Settling the contradiction reshaped the picture of the Sun's edge.
With its power fading about four watts a year, Voyager 1 is being kept alive one switched-off instrument at a time, against a hard limit: let it get too cold and the fuel lines that feed its antenna-pointing thrusters could freeze.
On 9 July 2026, OpenAI released GPT-5.6, which it calls its most capable system yet, to the public.
Researchers in central Japan painted plain black cows with white stripes, stood them in a pasture, and photographed the flies that landed on them.
Earth's magnetic field has reversed hundreds of times, last flipped around 780,000 years ago, and has weakened for two centuries. What that does, and does not, tell us.
The 1859 Carrington storm set telegraph offices sparking. A repeat could threaten modern power grids, and a much-quoted worst-case put full recovery at four to ten years, though experts disagree on the true scale.
Cassini data point two ways at once: Saturn's rings look like a recent addition, younger than most of the dinosaur era, and they are draining into the planet fast enough to vanish.
Beresheet crashed in 2019 with thousands of dormant tardigrades aboard. A later impact study suggests they probably did not survive, but the case is not closed.
For much of the internet's life, you could assume a person sat at the other end of most clicks.
Most of us reach for the phone, check it, and put it down again a couple of hundred times a day.
In 1843 someone published a step-by-step method for a machine to carry out a calculation — now widely seen as the first algorithm ever written for a machine.
Astronauts returning from long-duration missions almost universally report burning pain in the soles of the feet and deep lower-back ache within days of landing. The cause is a spine that grew by centimetres in orbit meeting Earth's gravity all at once.
Buzz Aldrin's 1973 memoir Return to Earth broke a quiet rule inside NASA by naming the depression that followed his Moon mission — and the pattern of post-mission identity collapse he described now shows up across almost every Apollo lunar module pilot.
The vestibular system runs silently every second of your life — until orbit removes the gravity its calcium-carbonate crystals were built to measure, and astronauts have to learn how to know which way is down all over again.
Early Tuesday morning, a softball-sized satellite built by Miami's City Labs reached low Earth orbit aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9, becoming the first commercially…
