In the spring of 2026, a team of paleontologists led by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County formally described a new species of reptile from a quarry in northern New Mexico.
On a small Greek island in the southern Aegean Sea, sometime around 1600 BCE, the inhabitants of a Bronze Age city called Akrotiri did something that most…
In 1816, a thirty-five-year-old French physician named René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec was working at the Hôpital Necker in Paris when a young woman arrived in his consultation room with symptoms of heart disease.
A survey of about 8,000 supermassive black holes has tracked their growth across roughly the last 10 billion years and found that accretion rates have been…
In 1988, a forest pathologist named Greg Whipple, working for the United States Forest Service in eastern Oregon, was investigating a pattern of tree deaths in the Malheur National Forest.
Albert Einstein died on April 18, 1955, in Princeton, New Jersey, at the age of 76. The cause of death was an abdominal aortic aneurysm.
On March 1, 1982, a Soviet spacecraft called Venera 13 descended through the dense yellow atmosphere of Venus and touched down on a flat, rocky plain east of a region called Phoebe Regio.
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched on April 24, 1990, aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery, in what was, at the time, the largest single scientific instrument ever placed in orbit.
Voyager 1 was launched from Cape Canaveral on September 5, 1977. The spacecraft was, at the time of launch, designed for a five-year mission to fly past Jupiter and Saturn and return scientific data about the outer planets.
On July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 lunar module Eagle descended toward the Sea of Tranquility with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin inside.
Somewhere around 10,000 years ago, a mass of iron from space struck the far north of Greenland.
In January 1961, three months before Alan Shepard became the first American astronaut to travel into space, the United States space program launched a chimpanzee on a suborbital flight aboard the second Mercury-Redstone mission.
In the autumn of 1967, a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge noticed a recurring smudge on a roll of chart paper.
With the Apollo Guidance Computer shut down to save battery power for reentry, the crew of Apollo 13 navigated home by holding the lunar terminator in a window crosshair and timing engine burns with an Omega Speedmaster wristwatch.
NASA's Parker Solar Probe is the fastest human-made object ever, sweeping the Sun's corona at 430,000 mph while a 4.5-inch carbon foam shield holds its instruments at room temperature behind a 2,500-degree face.
Pulled from a Roman shipwreck in 1901, the Antikythera mechanism is a hand-cranked bronze calculator from the first century BCE whose gear-train sophistication would not reappear in the surviving record for another fourteen hundred years.
