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.
The most useful thing about compressing Earth's history into a calendar year is not that the timestamps are perfect.
In 1998, Japanese psychiatrist Tamaki Saito coined the term hikikomori for young people who withdraw completely from society, estimating over a million cases in Japan — a number later government surveys would confirm.
NASA's Psyche spacecraft did not go to Mars because Mars was the destination. It went there because Mars was in the right place to do what rockets would otherwise have had to do with propellant: change the spacecraft's path and speed.
A one-pound rock found in the Sahara in 2019 has become evidence for something much larger than itself: a vanished planetary body from the first years of the solar system.
A small icy world found far beyond Pluto has made the case for some proposed versions of Planet Nine look weaker, not stronger.
Europa has earned its place in astrobiology for a simple reason: beneath its fractured ice shell, Jupiter's moon is thought to hold a global saltwater ocean in contact with a rocky interior.
In July 1054, court astronomers in China recorded a new "guest star" near Tianguan, the star we now call Zeta Tauri.
Two humpback whales have done something the species was not supposed to do often: they turned up on opposite sides of the planet, at breeding grounds normally treated as separate populations.
For the first time, astronomers have found compelling evidence of a magnetar being born inside a supernova.
For most of her life, a western lowland gorilla named Koko was among the best-known non-human animals on the planet.
A galaxy merger found by the James Webb Space Telescope has made the early universe look less orderly than the standard picture suggests.
In May 1967 a single-file column of roughly 500 men and 300 mules stretched for more than a mile along a ridge in Shan State, hauling sixteen tons of raw opium toward a lumber town across the Mekong in Laos.
Saturn's sixth-largest moon leaks. Through a set of fractures near its south pole, nicknamed the tiger stripes, Enceladus vents a steady plume of water vapour and ice grains into space, feeding one of Saturn's faint outer rings.
The bone was taller than the man standing beside it. That was the first real clue that the weathered shapes at the edge of a communal pond in Chaiyaphum province, in northeastern Thailand, were not stones.
