The tactic sounds cruel. It is not. It is, on the accumulated evidence from more than six decades of astronaut selection at NASA, the single most reliable way that the agency has found to identify the specific quality it needs its future astronauts to possess.
A dung beetle about 10 millimetres long, a species called Onthophagus taurus, has been measured pulling 1,141 times its own body weight.
Ignaz Semmelweis had the death rates to prove it. What he did not have, and could not have in 1847, was a reason the deaths happened at all.
On 2 December 1971, the Soviet Mars 3 lander did something no spacecraft had ever done.
Stand on Mars and watch the Sun go down, and two things would look strange to an Earthling's eye.
In January 1610, Galileo Galilei pointed a small telescope at Jupiter and saw something no one had ever recorded.
During Apollo 14 in 1971, Edgar Mitchell sat blindfolded in the command module and logged a flash of light in his vision every 2.9 minutes. The cause, it turned out, was cosmic rays passing through his eyeballs.
A decapitated cockroach can stand, walk, and respond to touch for about a week before dying — not from the wound, but from thirst. The reason lies in an open circulatory system and body-wide breathing that make the head, biologically speaking, almost optional.
Mars once had a global magnetic field, generated deep inside the planet, strong enough to deflect the solar wind much as Earth's does today.
Dark matter is thought to make up roughly 85 per cent of all the matter in the universe.
In the 1970s, Africa still held on the order of 90,000 lions. Today only about 20,000 to 25,000 remain, a collapse of roughly three-quarters in half a century…
In a sprint, it is no contest. A horse would leave a human far behind before either had gone a hundred metres.
Titan's air is so thick, and its gravity so gentle, that a person wearing the right pair of wings could plausibly push off the ground and glide through its sky.
The specific highest point on the planet Earth, measured by the standard elevation metric of height above mean sea level, is the summit of Mount Everest — the…
Sharks have been swimming in Earth's oceans for roughly 450 million years. They were here long before the dinosaurs, they survived every great mass extinction that followed, and they outlasted the dinosaurs by a vast margin.
The James Webb Space Telescope has picked up the same unexplained absorption signal on the surfaces of two very different frozen worlds, Pluto and Titan.
