Earth began without a Moon. The young planet, barely formed, had no companion in orbit, and how it came by one is a question that took most of a century, and a set of returned Moon rocks, to answer with any confidence.
Twenty years ago, somewhere above the Antarctic ice, a balloon-borne radio antenna recorded an event that, by every available standard of contemporary physics, should not have happened.
About half of the oxygen on Earth comes from the ocean. Not from the rainforests, which consume close to as much oxygen as they make, but from phytoplankton…
Hannibal was 28 years old, still a few years away from leading 37 war elephants over the Alps to invade Italy, when somewhere beneath the warm shallow water…
The smell most people mean when they say "the sea" is not salt. Salt is sodium chloride, a solid that does not evaporate at ordinary temperatures, so it has no odour at all.
The olm weighs about as much as a few coins and lives in the dark of European caves. Decades of breeding records point to a maximum lifespan above a century, yet the usual explanations for long life, low metabolism and strong defenses against cellular damage, do not fit.
On Racetrack Playa, stones heavy enough to need two hands leave grooves in the dried mud as if they walk. A weather station, fifteen GPS-fitted rocks and a set of time-lapse cameras finally recorded the cause, and it was almost nothing: a few millimeters of windowpane ice and a breeze.
Before SpaceX existed, Elon Musk spent late 2001 trying to buy refurbished Soviet missiles in Moscow to land a minibar-sized greenhouse on Mars. The plan, called Mars Oasis, was designed not to do science but to broadcast a single image — a green shoot against red dirt — back to Earth. When the Russians wouldn't sell cheap, Musk built the rocket company instead.
In the early hours of March 13, 1989, a coronal mass ejection from the Sun induced currents that collapsed Hydro-Québec's grid in 90 seconds, plunging six million people into a sub-zero blackout and rewriting how engineers think about space weather.
Inside John Gottman's Love Lab at the University of Washington, couples wired to heart-rate sensors revealed a pattern: when the pulse crossed 100 beats per minute, the conversation shut down. In heterosexual couples studied, 85% of the partners who went silent were men — and the body, not the mind, made the call.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. was incorporated in California in March 2002, and the legal name on the founding paperwork was the first clue Elon Musk was not building a normal aerospace company.
Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk recounts a September 2022 night when Musk personally ordered Starlink coverage withheld near Crimea, leaving Ukrainian sea drones offline mid-mission — the cleanest case yet of a private citizen flipping a switch in a shooting war.
Long-duration spaceflight crew selection now screens for the fawn stress response — the reflex to appease authority rather than challenge it — because on a sealed vehicle with seven people and no exit, a silenced crewmember is a silenced quarter of the crew's judgment.
MDA Space has not bought Blue Canyon Technologies yet. It has agreed to pay RTX $620 million in cash for the Colorado smallsat builder, and if regulators approve the deal by the end of 2026, a Canadian space company will own a U.S.
NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory has spent more than two decades watching for gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe.
The story sounds like it should end with a twist. An astronaut carries tree seeds around the Moon, the seeds are planted back on Earth, and the trees that grow are, in every way anyone has measured, just trees.
