Encyclopaedia Britannica reports that "the Antarctic Ice Sheet has a volume of 28 million cubic km (about 6.7 million cubic miles), which represents 70 percent of the total fresh water (including groundwater) in the world.
If the Sun could somehow vanish, not merely stop shining but disappear as a source of both light and gravity, the sky would stay bright on Earth's day side for…
Picture a single point in the South Pacific, halfway between the Chatham Islands of New Zealand and southern Chile, where the water runs more than 4,000 metres deep and the nearest coastline lies a continent's width away.
Every Cavendish banana on Earth is a clone of a single plant from an English duke's estate — and a soil fungus called Tropical Race 4, spreading through Asia, Africa and now Latin America, is doing to it what the same disease did to its predecessor in the 1950s.
Inside Colorado's Cheyenne Mountain, fifteen freestanding buildings rest on 1,319 thousand-pound steel springs, an engineering bet that flexible suspension would let a Cold War command center sway through a nuclear shock instead of snapping apart.
Honey from sealed Egyptian tombs has survived more than 3,000 years intact, protected by a triple defense: near-zero water content, an acidic pH around 4, and hydrogen peroxide generated by a bee enzyme called glucose oxidase. Together they create conditions where almost nothing biological can grow.
David Allen built Getting Things Done on a single neurological claim: the human brain is designed for generating ideas, not storing them, and every unfinished task you try to remember consumes the same working memory you need for thinking.
For the first human spaceflight, on 12 April 1961, Soviet engineers locked the manual controls of Yuri Gagarin's Vostok capsule and sealed the code that would release them inside an envelope in the cabin.
The map of the world hanging on the wall of nearly every classroom in the world, printed in the front of nearly every atlas, and displayed by default on Google…
Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, sits in a high valley along the Tuul River in north-central Mongolia, at an elevation of about 1,300 metres and a latitude of roughly 47 degrees north.
Jupiter's Great Red Spot is a storm wider than Earth that has been watched, without interruption, for well over a century.
Olympus Mons sits in the western hemisphere of Mars, in a region called Tharsis that is itself a vast volcanic plateau.
At 8:30 in the evening on Wednesday 2 November 1988, a 23-year-old graduate student named Robert Tappan Morris, in his first semester of a PhD programme in…
A long-running New Zealand cohort found associations between childhood self-control and later health, finances, and offending. Self-control was not shown to be the single predictor of adult happiness.
General relativity makes an odd-sounding prediction that has held up every time it has been tested: a clock higher in a gravitational field runs slightly faster than one lower down.
Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system, and it is not a close contest. The planet's mean surface temperature sits at about 464 degrees Celsius, according to NASA's overview of solar system temperatures.
