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.
TRAPPIST-1 is not impressive by the usual standards of stargazing. It is too faint to see with the naked eye, far cooler and smaller than the Sun, and located about 40 light-years away in the direction of Aquarius.
The simplest way to make Venus feel strange is not to begin with its heat, its pressure, or its acid clouds.
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.
In February 2021, Japan appointed Tetsushi Sakamoto as the world's second cabinet minister for loneliness, three years after Britain created the role. The move came after a pandemic-era surge in suicides, particularly among women, forced Tokyo to treat social isolation as a matter of state.
How a 24-year-old NASA engineer's handwritten alarm-code cheat sheet, taped to a Mission Control console three days before Apollo 11 launched, kept the first lunar landing from being aborted at 1,800 metres.
When Italian and German researchers modeled a square-meter array of 1,482 neodymium magnets, the simulation showed roughly a fifth of incoming low-energy solar protons being deflected — without any power supply, cryogenic cooling, or moving parts.
Leafcutter ants routinely haul loads 50 times their body weight — a scaling trick rooted in Galileo's square-cube law and a neck joint that can bear 5,000 times an ant's weight before failing.
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.
Mars looks still from a telescope, a rust-red disk hanging in the sky with no oceans, no forests and no weather systems large enough for the eye to follow.
Most explanations of American loneliness are explanations of character. People have forgotten how to talk to strangers.
A typical morning in Seoul is routed through a handful of family conglomerates before the commute is over.
The easiest mistake to make about Antarctica is to treat the ice as if it has always been there.
Saturn's moon Titan has rivers, rainfall, lakes and a slow hydrological cycle uncannily like Earth's — but the liquid is methane, the bedrock is frozen water ice, and the whole system runs at minus 179 degrees Celsius.
In the flooded caves of Slovenia, the blind, pale olm salamander can fast for ten years, sits motionless for years at a time, and lives past 100 in complete darkness.
