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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Science
A detector buried a kilometre underground in Japan may have caught the faintest signal ever recorded: the combined whisper of every supernova that has ever exploded across the entire universe, a background hum of stellar death that scientists have been straining to hear for decades
For nearly three decades, scientists have searched for proof that the universe's oldest explosions leave an eternal fingerprint in ghostly particles—and now they may have finally found it.
An AI searched nearly 100 million old Hubble images in two and a half days and found 1,300 cosmic oddities — more than 800 of them had never appeared in the scientific literature
Flint tools, scorched soil and two pieces of spark-producing pyrite suggest humans were deliberately making fire in Britain 400,000 years ago — far earlier than firm evidence had previously shown
Six miles below the Pacific, with no sunlight and no photosynthesis, a Chinese submersible found thousands of blood-red tubeworms and white clams thriving on leaking methane — the deepest animal ecosystem ever discovered on Earth
A blind person who loses their sight before the age of five may dream mostly without visual images, drawing instead on sound, touch, smell, and emotion: a pattern that suggests how far the dreaming brain reconstructs the world it was taught
What filled the universe in its first microseconds wasn’t gas, dust or atoms — it was a trillion-degree soup of quarks and gluons, and the LHC has now seen a single quark leave the wake through it that physicists had predicted for years
In 1848 an explosion drove a three-foot-seven iron bar clean through the skull of railway foreman Phineas Gage, who stayed conscious, spoke within minutes, and lived nearly twelve more years
Apollo 13 set the record for the farthest humans had travelled from Earth by accident in 1970, after an explosion forced it into an emergency loop around the Moon. Artemis II broke it by design in April 2026, flying exactly 4,101 miles farther — then proposing names for two lunar craters as the crew passed overhead
The most common type of planet in the known galaxy is one that does not exist in our solar system — a world larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, a size our own neighbourhood entirely skipped, now counted in the thousands across NASA's confirmed exoplanet archive
You do not lose most body heat through your head: it leaks only about a tenth, roughly its share of your skin — the myth traces to a 1950s test in which participants were bundled up warm but left bare-headed
A 2025 MIT-led study mapped 32,000 skills across 923 occupations and found current AI tools can already perform work representing 11.7 per cent of America’s entire wage bill — about $1.2 trillion a year
