On the evening of Saturday, 6 January 1912, in the meeting hall of the Frankfurt Geological Association, a 31-year-old German meteorologist named Alfred…
In 2013, the psychologist Roy Baumeister and three colleagues published a paper with a plain title: "Some Key Differences between a Happy Life and a Meaningful Life.
Humanity has sent cameras to the Moon, Mars, Venus and the outer planets, but on Earth itself there is still a larger frontier that has barely been looked at directly.
A blue whale can send a call through the ocean with a voice deeper than almost any animal sound on Earth.
A whippet at full sprint looks less like an animal running than a spring being released.
In 2013, a study reported something remarkable about bottlenose dolphins. They could recognise the calls of animals they had once lived with but had not heard for more than 20 years, one of the longest social memories ever documented in a non-human animal.
Two of the largest reported structures in the distant universe do not just look strange on their own.
For much of the past century, many scientists believed the dinosaurs were already in decline when the asteroid struck 66 million years ago, a group past its prime that a cosmic accident merely finished off.
Keeping a data centre cool on Earth is a surprisingly large part of the job. Cooling can swallow anywhere from a tenth to a third of a facility's entire energy budget, and the thirstiest sites drink millions of litres of water to do it.
Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is now so far from Earth that a radio signal travelling at the speed of light takes more than 22 hours to reach it.
Anxiety is still more often treated as a mood problem than a biology problem. A new study makes that harder to justify.
Ask how many Earth-like planets there are, and the honest answer is that serious researchers give estimates spanning more than twenty orders of magnitude.
A few years ago, Saturn was listed with 83 moons. Then astronomers looked harder, began finding them dozens at a time, and by 2026 the tally had reached 285, so many that Saturn now has nearly three times as many confirmed moons as Jupiter.
Travel to another star at almost the speed of light and something strange happens to time.
If microbial life is ever confirmed beyond Earth, on Mars, in the hidden ocean of Europa, or in the icy plumes of Enceladus, it would rank among the most consequential discoveries in the history of science.
In the 1960s, NASA and the Atomic Energy Commission built nuclear rocket engines and test-fired them dozens of times in the Nevada desert.
