How Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer's 1938 find at East London revealed a living coelacanth, what J.L.B. Smith recognised, and why the popular 'living fossil' and 'fish that walked onto land' framings overstate what the discovery actually showed.
The popular framing of streaming's environmental cost has, for much of the past five years, treated digital entertainment as a quiet ecological catastrophe.
A long stretch of life after the last possible child is, on the face of it, an evolutionary puzzle.
Soviet geologists set the Darvaza gas crater alight in 1971 expecting the flames to last weeks. More than five decades later, the Door to Hell is still burning in the middle of Turkmenistan's Karakum Desert.
The Everest comparison is one of the rare scale facts that survives a careful check: at roughly 10,935 metres, Challenger Deep would bury Everest's 8,849-metre summit under more than two kilometres of water. What the picture leaves out is pressure, not distance.
For six days a penny paper described forests, beaches and bat-winged people on the lunar surface, all credited to a famous astronomer who knew nothing about it. The story of the Great Moon Hoax is partly a story about how a public learns to doubt.
Turritopsis dohrnii, a four-millimetre Mediterranean jellyfish, can dismantle its adult body and grow back into its juvenile polyp stage when stressed — and biologists have watched it do this indefinitely.
The popular framing of emotional pain treats it as something metaphorical. The broken heart of unrequited love, the sting of rejection, the ache of grief, the…
Twenty minutes after Eagle landed, Buzz Aldrin took Communion on the Moon using a chalice from a small Texas church — and NASA, then being sued over the Apollo 8 Genesis reading, asked him to keep it off the radio.
There is a specific moment, usually in childhood or early adolescence, when most people first hear a recording of their own voice and discover, with mild horror, that it does not sound the way they expected.
Update, 15 September 2026: this article reports the Oxford thick-disk analysis as it stood in June 2026. Isotope measurements published in Nature later that…
The Earth, in any given 24-hour period, is being slowly snowed on by the rest of the solar system.
The Mars-500 simulation sealed six men in a mock spacecraft for 520 days. A University of Pennsylvania sleep study found only two kept normal sleep; the rest drifted, one onto a roughly 25-hour day. What the result shows about long missions, and what a ground simulation cannot.
The last human being to walk on the Moon stepped off the lunar surface at 5:40 AM Coordinated Universal Time on 14 December 1972. His name was Eugene Cernan.
The 80-year-old is, in historical terms, an unusual phenomenon. For most of recorded human existence, the average life expectancy at birth sat somewhere between 25 and 35 years, primarily because of childhood mortality.
The story begins in Taiwan in the early 1980s, where roughly 10 to 15 percent of school-age children were nearsighted.
