The gas giant WD 1856 b should have been swallowed when its star ballooned into a red giant. Webb found methane, haze, and a faint leftover heat in its air, and that heat became the clue to how the planet survived.
The visceral test of a claim like this is whether the numbers hold up under examination.
The LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA network released its fifth catalog on May 26, and the tally of collisions detected since 2015 now stands at 390. Most are black holes finding each other in the dark. A few are stranger than that.
On 13 April 2029, an asteroid the size of a large skyscraper, roughly 375 metres across and named Apophis, will sweep past Earth closer than many telecommunications satellites orbit.
The 1993 study was real. It measured a small, temporary gain on a single spatial task in adults. Almost everything the phrase came to mean was added afterward.
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.
Roughly one in five people, on the current best population estimates, notices the buzzing of a fluorescent light in an office that most other people cannot hear.
Costa Rica's forest cover fell to about 21% by the late 1980s. A 1996 law and a 3.5% national fuel tax reversed the collapse by paying more than 18,000 families to keep their trees standing — and forest cover has since climbed back above 50%.
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.
The invasion had been building for a decade. Fu Jian, ruler of the Former Qin dynasty and a member of the Di ethnic group from the northwestern grasslands, had spent the 370s systematically conquering every other state in northern China.
In September 1942, approximately nine months after his marriage to the young Viennese nurse Tilly Grosser, and approximately four years after Nazi Germany's…
The specific Japanese-language word for the physical act of bowing — ojigi (お辞儀), literally "the honourable bending of the body" — refers to a substantially…
In June 1980, the Japanese sanitary-equipment manufacturer TOTO Ltd launched the Washlet — a new consumer electronic device that bolted onto the top of a…
For thirteen years, a spacecraft called Cassini circled Saturn. It flew straight through the icy plumes erupting from the little moon Enceladus, tasted water…
Reading the front page of a Japanese-language newspaper in 2026 requires, at minimum, four things.
