The 1983 TTAPS paper by Carl Sagan and four colleagues coined the phrase nuclear winter and helped push Reagan and Gorbachev toward arms talks. The climate model that produced it was built a decade earlier to explain why Mariner 9 found Mars hidden under a planet-wide dust storm.
About 5.6 million years ago, the Mediterranean Sea began to evaporate. The Strait of Gibraltar, the narrow connection between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean, closed for the last time during a slow tectonic shift between Africa and Europe.
Jupiter's moon Europa has long been one of the most compelling objects in the solar system — not for what can be seen on its surface, but for what scientists suspect lies beneath it.
On 3 December 1992, in a Vodafone office west of London, a 22-year-old British software engineer named Neil Papworth sat at a desktop computer terminal, typed "Merry Christmas" using full words rather than the now-conventional abbreviations, and pressed send.
In late 1971, a computer engineer named Raymond Tomlinson was working at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on two separate programs for the ARPANET — the experimental computer network that would eventually become the internet.
When a troop of chacma baboons moves across the Cape Peninsula, they do it in a line.
The night of 25-26 September 1983 was an ordinary shift for Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, a 44-year-old officer of the Soviet Air Defence Forces.
The most recent person from whom every human being now alive is descended lived approximately 3,000 years ago.
Global plastic production in 1950, when large-scale industrial manufacture of polymer resins and synthetic fibres had just begun, was approximately 2 million tonnes.
Many of us assume warmth comes first. You like someone, so you help them. The kindness follows the affection, in that order.
In the Orkney archipelago, off the northern coast of Scotland, two small islands sit 1.7 miles apart across a stretch of cold North Sea water.
Egypt has roughly 118 ancient pyramids. Sudan, its southern neighbour, has about 255. The difference is not a recent reclassification or a contested count.
In September 2023, seismometers across the globe began picking up a signal no one recognised.
The number that gets quoted most about AI's energy use is the one attached to a single prompt.
On July 3, 1969, the second N1 moon rocket rose 200 metres before falling back onto its launch pad in Kazakhstan, releasing roughly seven kilotons of energy in what is widely cited as the largest non-nuclear explosion in human history — a disaster the Soviet Union refused to acknowledge for two decades.
The mechanism behind a burp on Earth is something most humans do not stop to think about.
