Science & Engineering
When a Scottish sheep named Dolly was born on July 5, 1996
On 5 July 1996, in a barn at the Roslin Institute outside Edinburgh, a Finn Dorset lamb was born to a Scottish Blackface surrogate ewe.
Psychology
In a Beijing laboratory, 25 volunteers spent a week learning to fly with feathered…
In a single study published in May 2026 in Cell Reports, researchers at Peking University and Beijing Normal University asked twenty-five volunteers to spend a week learning to fly.
Science & Engineering
In 2018, a Chinese biophysicist announced he had gene-edited twin girls using CRISPR
On 25 November 2018, two days before an international summit on human genome editing was due to open in Hong Kong, the MIT Technology Review broke the story…
Universe
Thought of the day by Albert Einstein: "The most incomprehensible thing about the…
The line, in one form or another, is one of the most cited things Albert Einstein is said to have written.
Culture
In 1811, the planners of Manhattan's street grid accidentally built one of the…
For a few minutes on four evenings each year, the setting sun falls into perfect alignment with the east-west cross streets of Manhattan, throwing a low golden corridor of light from river to river through the canyons of midtown.
Science & Engineering
Earth is quietly dusted with thousands of tonnes of space material every year, most…
Extraterrestrial dust falls on every part of the Earth, including the parts covered in cities.
Science & Engineering
75% of Americans say they would trust AI shopping recommendations less if results…
Quad/Graphics and The Harris Poll released a survey on 13 April 2026 titled "The New Rules of Retail Trust in the Age of AI.
Space & Missions
The makers of the Voyager Golden Record could not assume an alien would understand…
The two Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977, each carry a gold-plated copper phonograph record.
Universe
Neptune was found not by anyone scanning the night sky but by mathematics
On the night of 23 September 1846, an astronomer at the Berlin Observatory pointed a telescope at a particular patch of sky, compared what he saw against a star chart, and found a planet that no chart recorded.
Universe
When Vera Rubin measured the spin of galaxies, she found their outer stars moving…
Beginning with the Andromeda galaxy in the late 1960s, the astronomer Vera Rubin and her colleague Kent Ford measured how fast stars and gas clouds orbit at different distances from a galaxy's centre.
Science & Engineering
The asteroid that ended the dinosaurs happened to strike a shallow seabed rich in…
The asteroid that struck near Chicxulub, in what is now the Yucatán Peninsula, about 66 million years ago did not hit a random patch of the planet.
Science & Engineering
In 1964, a quiet British physicist named Peter Higgs proposed the existence of an…
On 19 October 1964, Physical Review Letters published a two-page communication by Peter Higgs of the Tait Institute of Mathematical Physics at the University of Edinburgh.
Science & Engineering
The Human Genome Project was declared complete in 2003
On 14 April 2003, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium announced the completion of the Human Genome Project through the National Human Genome Research Institute and the US Department of Energy.
Deep Space
In 1992, the number of confirmed planets outside our solar system was zero
The official tally of confirmed planets outside our solar system, maintained by NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech, has passed 6,000. The agency…
Science & Engineering
There is a spot in the South Pacific so far from any coastline that when the…
There is a location in the South Pacific so far from land that, for stretches of any given day, the closest human beings to it are not on the Earth's surface at all.
Science & Engineering
China has just sent stem-cell-grown structures resembling early human embryos to…
On May 10, 2026, a Long March rocket lifted off from the Wenchang Space Launch Site on China's southern coast, carrying the Tianzhou-10 cargo spacecraft toward the Tiangong space station.