Constellations
In 2017, astronomers spotted the first object ever confirmed to have come from…
In October 2017, a survey telescope on Maui caught a faint, fast point of light that did not belong here.
Science & Engineering
Rocket debris that has been drifting in low Earth orbit since the 1960s just helped…
Spent rocket stages and defunct satellites do not manoeuvre. Once launched, they simply fall, very slowly, pulled toward Earth by the drag of an upper atmosphere that thickens and thins with the Sun's eleven-year activity cycle.
Science & Engineering
Tyrannosaurus rex lived closer in time to humans than to Stegosaurus
The popular mental image of the Mesozoic Era treats it as a single long period in which dinosaurs lived together, in roughly the configurations that toy companies have arranged them.
Science & Engineering
There is a species of jellyfish that is essentially immortal
In the warm coastal waters of the Mediterranean, and now globally distributed via ship ballast water, lives a translucent jellyfish about the size of a pinky-nail clipping, with a bright red stomach visible through its bell.
Science & Engineering
Honeybees can recognize human faces — they can be trained to distinguish between…
The standard popular framing of human facial recognition treats it as a problem so complex that large brains and specialised neural regions are required to solve it.
Science & Engineering
There is a fish that can live more than a hundred years
In the deep, cold waters of the North Pacific, between Japan and the Aleutian Islands, lives a slow-growing red fish called the rougheye rockfish, Sebastes aleutianus.
Science & Engineering
There are about 20 quadrillion ants alive on Earth at any moment
The 2022 paper that established the modern estimate of how many ants are alive on Earth was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Patrick Schultheiss, Sabine Nooten and colleagues.
Science & Engineering
Bananas are slightly radioactive — they contain potassium-40, a naturally occurring…
Bananas are slightly radioactive. They are one of the most potassium-rich common foods, with about 0.5 grams of potassium in a typical 150-gram fruit, and…
Science & Engineering
Deep beneath our feet, Earth’s inner core is thought to be roughly as hot as the…
Roughly 5,100 kilometres beneath the surface, Earth's inner core is usually estimated to sit somewhere around 5,000 to 6,000 degrees Celsius, close to the temperature of the Sun's visible surface.
Space & Missions
Bolted to Pioneer 10 is a plaque showing two humans and a cosmic map back to Earth…
Bolted to the side of Pioneer 10 is a gold-anodised aluminium plaque, about 152 by 229 millimetres, engraved with the figures of a man and a woman and a set of symbols meant to mark where and when the spacecraft came from.
Space & Missions
After a crippled seven-year journey Japan's Hayabusa probe limped home in 2010 and…
Japan's Hayabusa probe returned to Earth on 13 June 2010, breaking apart in a bright streak over the Woomera Test Range in South Australia.
Space & Missions
When the Apollo 11 crew prepared to leave the Moon, they found the circuit breaker…
After their first moonwalk, Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were back inside the Eagle, attempting to rest before the ascent.
Science & Engineering
Nearly four kilometres beneath the Antarctic ice sheet lies Lake Vostok, a hidden…
Nearly four kilometres beneath the East Antarctic ice sheet sits Lake Vostok, a body of freshwater roughly the size of Lake Ontario.
Universe
The Sun is not standing still. It is carrying the entire Solar System around the…
The Sun is not fixed in space. It carries the entire Solar System around the centre of the Milky Way, completing one lap in roughly 230 million years.
Science & Engineering
A total solar eclipse is only possible because of a cosmic coincidence
A total solar eclipse rests on a coincidence that is simple to state and still hard to quite accept.
Science & Engineering
The Moon looks white in the night sky, but its surface is closer in color to a worn…
The Moon looks white in the night sky, sometimes silver, sometimes yellow or orange when it sits low on the horizon.