A child born this year will, by the time they reach late middle age, almost certainly live in a world where the human population is no longer growing.
Someone in central Turkey, approximately 8,600 years ago, kneaded a small lump of dough, pressed their finger into the top of it, set it down next to a…
In February 1966, the Soviet Luna 9 became the first spacecraft to survive a Moon landing — and Britain's Jodrell Bank intercepted its picture signal, decoded it with a newspaper fax receiver, and printed the photographs in the Daily Express before Moscow could release them.
The most striking discovery in recent Maya archaeology was not made by an expedition cutting through jungle with machetes, was not made by a satellite team…
The popular factoid is true, but only under two assumptions most versions leave out. A look at the arithmetic: which planet diameters you use, and where the Moon sits in its orbit, decide whether the planets fit.
A small space telescope concept has been proposed to settle one of the most stubborn arguments in exoplanet science: why the galaxy seems to skip over worlds that are about 1.8 times the size of Earth.
A five-story stain of deep red spills from the white snout of an Antarctic glacier. The cause is not algae and not quite rust: it is ancient, salty, iron-loaded water that has no color underground and turns red only when it meets the open air.
For nearly a decade, the architect of every Soviet space first — Sputnik, Gagarin, Luna, Venera — was known to the public only as the Chief Designer. His name and face appeared in Pravda for the first time the morning after he died on a Moscow operating table in January 1966.
NASA's Chandra and ESA's XMM-Newton point to a possible supernova remnant in Sagittarius C, near the galactic centre. New analysis of archival data, published in The Astrophysical Journal, suggests an explosion at least 1,700 years ago, though it remains a candidate.
Off Amami Oshima, a 12-centimetre pufferfish spends a week building two-metre sand sculptures so geometric they were mistaken for mysteries until 2011 — courtship architecture from a species not named until 2014.
In 1999, Fujitsu's Horizon accounting system was deployed across 14,000 UK Post Office branches. Within months it was producing phantom shortfalls — and within years more than 700 subpostmasters had been prosecuted on its evidence, in what is now recognised as the largest miscarriage of justice in British legal history.
Voyager 1 is, by every available measure, the longest-running and most successful piece of deep-space hardware in the history of the species.
Every 26 months, the orbits of Earth and Mars align in a particular geometric configuration that allows spacecraft to travel between them with the lowest possible fuel expenditure.
The VA269 flight from French Guiana carries the heaviest payload ever launched by an Ariane launcher and marks the first use of the upgraded P160C solid boosters that raise Ariane 64's capacity to roughly 22 tonnes in low Earth orbit.
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.
