NASA's Parker Solar Probe is the fastest object ever built, flying through the Sun's corona at 430,000 mph while a 4.5-inch carbon foam shield keeps its instruments at room temperature against 2,500-degree heat.
Hubble's primary mirror was polished to perfection, just to the wrong shape, because the device built to measure it had a chipped flake of paint that threw its internal geometry off by 1.3 millimeters. The mirror was checked against a ruler that was itself broken.
For three decades, two NASA probes drifting toward interstellar space appeared to be decelerating by an amount that gravity alone could not explain. The resolution turned out to be the spacecraft warming themselves.
Around 1750 BC, in the city of Ur, a man named Nanni paid for a delivery of copper that turned up substandard.
In 1995, a team of British radio astronomers led by Dr Tom Millar pointed one of the world's largest radio telescopes at a faint patch of sky in the constellation Aquila — the Eagle.
When the first draft of the Neanderthal genome was published in 2010, researchers found that most people with recent ancestry outside Africa carry roughly 1 to 4 percent Neanderthal DNA.
The connection is one of those facts about the planet that nobody designed and almost no one outside the relevant atmospheric science literature knows about.
Thirteen years after landing in Gale Crater, NASA's Curiosity rover has produced what may be its most significant scientific result to date.
A team of researchers led by Luis Salazar Manzano and Teresa Paneque-Carreño of the University of Michigan Department of Astronomy has measured the water…
The scene that has stayed with most viewers of Christopher Nolan's Interstellar is not the wave-planet, or the visualised black hole, or the climactic library of moments.
In 2016, during the dry season when water levels in a communal pond in northeastern Thailand had receded enough to expose its edges, a local resident in Chaiyaphum province noticed a pile of large bones along the bank.
The statement is one that most adults will, at some point, have made. They want to be alone.
The standard cultural framing of where one's nervous system is located tends to assume that the nervous system is, in any meaningful sense, all in the head.
The Earth's magnetic field is, by every available measurement, the structural feature that protects the surface of the planet from most of the solar radiation that would otherwise sterilize it.
There is a particular fact about the most precise atomic clocks currently in operation that the wider cultural register has, on the available evidence, not yet adequately absorbed.
NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was designed to attempt up to five experimental test flights over thirty days.
