In March 1979, NASA's Voyager 1 probe swept past Jupiter and, in an image taken not for science but for navigation, captured the first active volcano ever seen on a world other than Earth.
It might sound strange but a swarm of bees deciding where to live is perhaps one of the cleanest examples of a crowd making a good choice without anyone in charge.
The mountain is Chimborazo, a long-quiet volcano in the Andes of Ecuador, and the claim about it is true: its summit is the point on the surface of the Earth that sits farthest from the planet's centre.
Picture a single society running from the Italian Riviera to the Atlantic edge of Spain, its members numbering in the billions, none of them ever raising a weapon against another.
The popular framing of human evolution, repeated across textbooks, museum exhibits, and most contemporary writing on the subject, is that the human brain has been getting larger across the entirety of our evolutionary history.
This piece summarises published research on ageing and emotional well-being. We are not psychologists or clinicians, and nothing here is psychological advice.
The number that anchors everything is about 600 volts. That is the peak discharge an electric eel can deliver, several times the roughly 120 volts of a North American wall socket.
When researchers at the Australian National University played recordings of superb lyrebird mimicry to grey shrike-thrushes, the shrike-thrushes responded to the fakes much as they would to one of their own.
A 2021 Nottingham Trent University study of almost 1,000 people identified a fourth personality group — high on dark traits, but above average on empathy. The mechanism: cognitive empathy intact, affective empathy muted.
Somewhere in the Chamaeleon constellation, six hundred and twenty years ago, a small dark planet about the size of Jupiter began to do something planets are not supposed to be able to do.
A team rebuilt the galaxy count from decades of deep-sky surveys and arrived at roughly two trillion, with about nine in ten of them beyond the reach of current instruments. A later reading of the sky's faint glow hints the real figure may be far lower.
Alan Shepard's 15-minute suborbital flight on May 5, 1961, made him the first American in space — but the four-hour hold before launch, and what it forced him to do inside a sealed pressure suit, quietly rewrote how NASA designed every long-duration mission that followed.
Worrying about getting old, it turns out, may not be a neutral psychological activity.
John McFall lost his right leg in a motorcycle accident at 19, won a Paralympic bronze medal in Beijing, became an orthopaedic surgeon, and may now become the first person with a physical disability to live and work in orbit.
The Ngogo chimpanzees of Kibale National Park in western Uganda have been continuously studied by primatologists for thirty years.
If you are currently in your mid-forties and feeling somewhat worse about your life than you remember feeling in your twenties, the data suggest you are not alone, you are not broken, and the curve you are on bends back upward.
