Somewhere in the North Pacific, an unidentified animal once produced a call unlike any other signal in a vast archive of whale sounds.
In June 1989, a seventeen-year-old Elon Musk left South Africa for Canada on his own, having secured a Canadian passport through his Canadian-born mother.
Hubble’s first images did not look like the beginning of a new era in astronomy.
South Korea has spent close to 20 years and hundreds of trillions of won trying to get its citizens to have more children.
Around 1967, Harvard turned down a young astronomer for tenure. His name was Carl Sagan.
{"content":"On 3 November 1957, a small mongrel dog named Laika lay strapped inside a pressurised capsule roughly the size of a washing machine, riding a modified R-7 intercontinental ballistic mis
Look at the veins on the back of your hand. They probably read as blue, maybe faintly green, and the anatomy poster on the classroom wall backs you up: arteries in red, veins in blue.
The corner-cube reflectors Buzz Aldrin, Alan Shepard and David Scott left on the Moon between 1969 and 1971 are still returning laser pulses fired from Earth — and 57 years of measurements show our nearest neighbour is receding at exactly 3.8 centimetres a year, the rate a human fingernail grows.
Jupiter, at 318 Earth masses, produces a tidal pull on our oceans equal to two-thousandths of one per cent of the Moon's — and combining every planet in perfect alignment still loses to an ordinary weather front.
Titan's methane seas hold hundreds of times more hydrocarbon than every oil and gas reserve on Earth, but with almost no oxygen in the air, none of it can burn.
Saturn's moon Titan runs Earth's weather cycle with the wrong chemicals: mountains of water ice hard as granite, seas of liquid methane and ethane, and beaches darkened by organic soot falling from an orange sky.
The Sun outweighs the Moon by a factor of 27 million, yet contributes only 46 percent of Earth's tidal force. The reason is a cube-law that punishes distance far more than gravity itself does.
Isaac Newton worked out in 1687 why the ocean bulges on both sides of Earth at once. The near-side bulge is pulled toward the Moon. The far-side bulge exists because the solid Earth itself is being tugged out from under the water — and the geometry of that stretching is slowly pushing the Moon away at 3.8 centimeters a year.
Roughly 99.999 percent of Earth's gold and platinum sank into the core during the magma ocean phase 4.5 billion years ago. The gold humans mine today was delivered later — in a rain of asteroids called the late veneer.
Once a year, on a Thursday in November, South Korea reorganises its national infrastructure around a single exam.
In 1980, a science documentary hosted by an astronomer became the most watched series in the history of American public television.
