When Singapore opened the Marina Barrage on 31 October 2008, it sealed off a tidal estuary in the middle of the financial district with nine 70-tonne gates and seven giant drainage pumps. The dam turned a polluted river mouth into a freshwater reservoir, ended chronic downtown flooding, and now supplies drinking water to a city that has almost no rivers of its own.
Neptune is a planet humans have visited exactly once, for a few hours, in 1989, when Voyager 2 swept past and kept going.
The Strait of Malacca and Singapore Strait carry roughly a quarter of global oil shipments through a channel so shallow that fully laden supertankers pass with only a metre or two of water beneath their keels — a clearance thinner than a kitchen countertop.
The stream is called Cheonggyecheon. It runs approximately 10.8 kilometres west to east through the centre of Seoul, beginning in the hills north of the city and emptying into the Han River that bisects the Korean capital.
Getting to Cova 338 still requires a long walk. The cave sits in the Núria Valley in the Girona region of northeastern Spain, 2,235 metres above sea level, inside a natural park where motorized access is forbidden.
On 9 June 2026, the US Food and Drug Administration added bemotrizinol to the list of active ingredients permitted in over-the-counter sunscreens, according to the agency's news release.
The 75-year-old Sardinian shepherd Tonino Tola, profiled by National Geographic during Dan Buettner's original Blue Zones research in the early 2000s, walked at least five miles every day along the rugged mountain trails of his island's interior.
Tigertail seahorses, fluted giant clams and the occasional dugong still inhabit the turbid waters of the Singapore Strait, where citizen scientists are logging sightings just kilometres from shipping lanes that move roughly 1,000 vessels a day.
On 25 May, a rule adopted by Maine's Board of Environmental Protection in April 2024 came into force.
The narwhal's spiraled tusk is an inside-out canine tooth with around 10 million exposed nerve endings, and drone footage from Nunavut has caught males using it to stun Arctic cod with sharp downward strikes before swallowing them whole.
In February 2017, a team of researchers from Imperial College London and the World Health Organization published one of the most rigorous life expectancy forecasts ever attempted.
The Singapore Strait squeezes roughly a third of global trade through a fairway just 3 kilometres wide at Phillip Channel, where ships queue for days, pirates strike from Indonesian inlets, and a single delay ripples through factories from Yantian to Poland.
Iceye, the Finnish radar satellite operator, has raised more than 1 billion euros in a round that values the company at over 10 billion euros — among the largest capital raises in European space history.
In the late summer of 1977, NASA bolted a gold-plated copper phonograph record to the side of each of the two Voyager spacecraft.
Sperm whale echolocation clicks have been measured at 230 decibels underwater — the loudest sound produced by any animal on Earth, intense enough that researchers suspect close-range pulses can stun squid and disorient divers.
Plants do not usually live longer because their conditions are worse. Yet the Great Basin bristlecone pine, Pinus longaeva, complicates that rule.
