A trash fire in 1962 ignited the anthracite seam beneath Centralia, Pennsylvania, and federal estimates say the underground blaze has enough fuel to burn for another 250 years, longer than any modeled recovery from nuclear winter.
On November 20, 1983, an estimated 100 million Americans watched ABC's nuclear war film 'The Day After' on a single night. President Reagan, who had screened it a month earlier, wrote in his diary that it left him 'greatly depressed', a reaction his biographers later linked to the path that led to the Reykjavik summit and the INF Treaty.
Every so often, Earth picks up a second moon. Not the kind anyone notices, and never for long.
The people who build today's most capable artificial intelligence can describe exactly how they train it.
Around almost the entire Australian coast, Aboriginal communities have told stories of a time when the sea came inland and swallowed country that people had walked on, hunted across and named.
The most unsettling feature of a mass extinction may be that it does not feel like one from inside it.
A previously unrecorded Maya city has been identified in eastern Campeche, Mexico, not by an expedition cutting through jungle but by a graduate student reanalysing a laser survey flown in 2013 to monitor forests.
The image we have inherited of the first Mars crew is a figure on a ridge at dawn, helmet catching the light, a red desert running out to a pink horizon.
The James Webb Space Telescope has confirmed MoM-z14, the most distant spectroscopically confirmed galaxy yet, whose light left it about 280 million years after the Big Bang.
The largest insect known to science was a predator called Meganeuropsis permiana, with a wingspan of about 71 centimetres, a little over two feet.
The artificial intelligence that holds the public's attention writes essays, answers questions and holds a conversation.
In October 1959, the Soviet Luna 3 probe took the first photographs of the Moon's far side, developed the film in a tiny onboard darkroom, and scanned the prints to radio them back to Earth — a chain of engineering improbabilities that redrew the map of the solar system.
The International Space Station travels fast enough that its crew pass through sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets in the course of a single day.
Somewhere on the ridge of Cerro Pachón in northern Chile, a telescope with an 8.4-metre mirror is in the final stages of preparation for the most comprehensive survey of the solar system ever attempted.
A paper published in Nature Chemistry in May 2025 describes what its authors call the first demonstration of exponential RNA replication by a polymerase ribozyme under conditions that could plausibly have occurred on the early Earth.
The United States Climate Prediction Center has an El Niño Watch in place, and in its mid-May 2026 discussion it put the odds of El Niño emerging in the…
