Universe
The Big Bang did not explode into empty space from a central point
Ask where the Big Bang happened and most people will gesture at some distant point in the sky, the spot where it all went off.
Climate Science
In January 2005, the Huygens probe parachuted for 147 minutes through Titan’s…
On January 14, 2005, the European Space Agency's Huygens probe parachuted through Titan's orange haze for two hours and twenty-seven minutes, landed on a damp plain of methane-soaked ice pebbles, and transmitted for another seventy-two minutes before its batteries died. It remains the only spacecraft ever to land in the outer solar system.
Universe
When NASA lost contact with the Pioneer 10 spacecraft in January 2003, it was more…
On 23 January 2003, NASA's Deep Space Network heard Pioneer 10's last faint signal from 11.9 billion kilometres away — a spacecraft built for a 21-month mission, still transmitting after three decades, falling silent as its plutonium power supply finally ran too low to speak.
Science & Engineering
In 1968, the engineers building the Apollo Guidance Computer wove its software into…
The Apollo Guidance Computer's flight program was not loaded onto the spacecraft — it was physically woven into memory by women threading copper wire through magnetic rings by hand, a process the engineers nicknamed LOL memory.
Space & Missions
In 2026, Airi Toida and Yuichiro Ezoe modeled a sub-10-kilogram X-ray telescope…
A sub-10-kilogram X-ray telescope modeled by researchers at Tokyo Metropolitan University could map oxygen, iron, magnesium, aluminum, and silicon across the entire lunar surface in about two years, if it ever flies on a small satellite around the Moon.
Universe
MIT engineers just collapsed the oldest tradeoff in satellite propulsion
A small satellite the size of a briefcase may soon become one of the most flexible spacecraft NASA has ever flown — and the reason comes down to a single tank of fuel doing two very different jobs.
Constellations
At the University of Twente, Davoud Jafari's team flew 3D-printed nickel-titanium…
A research team at the University of Twente has taken one of thermal engineering's hardest problems off the simulation bench and into the air, running pool…
Science & Engineering
The fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis infects carpenter ants in tropical forests…
The fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis has been hijacking carpenter ants for at least 48 million years, steering them to a precise height and humidity before locking their jaws to a leaf and sprouting a spore-shedding stalk from their heads.
Human Behaviour
The longest piece of music ever composed is being performed right now in a church…
In the former Cistercian convent church of St. Burchardi, in the small town of Halberstadt in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, a single sustained chord has…
Psychology
In the original Dunning-Kruger studies, bottom-quartile performers greatly…
Correction, September 20, 2026: The headline was revised because the 1999 results showed large overestimation among bottom-quartile performers, not that they consistently rated themselves above the top performers.
Psychology
Close relationships are associated with better later-life wellbeing, but they are…
Long-running studies link stronger social relationships with several health and wellbeing outcomes. They do not rank relationships above exercise or diet, or prove that connection prevents dementia.
Human Factors
Around 240 BCE, Eratosthenes used shadows and geometry to estimate Earth’s…
Eratosthenes of Cyrene, born around 276 BCE in what is now Libya and serving from his mid-thirties onward as the third chief librarian of the great Library of…
Constellations
The next great space race may not be to plant flags, but to bring home the first…
The competition that matters most in planetary science right now is not about boots or banners.
Human Factors
Only 66 years separate the Wright Brothers' first 12-second powered flight in 1903…
On the morning of 17 December 1903, on a stretch of windswept sand at Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright lay flat on the lower…
Science & Engineering
Periodical cicadas in the eastern United States emerge from the ground every 13 or…
In the spring of 2024, two enormous populations of periodical cicadas emerged simultaneously from the soil across the eastern and midwestern United States for…
Early Earth
In 2004, paleontologists digging in the Canadian Arctic unearthed the fossil of a…
In 1999, three paleontologists made a decision that would, five years later, lead them to one of the most important fossil discoveries of the twenty-first century.