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Science
Bowhead whales can live past 200 years, and biologists studying their DNA have found unique gene variants for repairing damage that may explain why they almost never develop the cancers that kill most other large mammals before 80.
A bowhead whale calf born the year Thomas Jefferson took office could, in principle, still be alive today, drifting under the Arctic ice with a harpoon point from the 1840s lodged in its blubber.
In summer 2025, a roughly 4.56-billion-year-old meteorite crashed through the roof of a home in McDonough, Georgia — and analysis by researchers at the University of Georgia determined the rock is approximately 20 million years older than Earth itself, meaning the homeowner spent that night sleeping in a house that had just been physically struck by a piece of the solar system older than the planet she was standing on
A spacecraft travelling at Parker Solar Probe’s peak speed would reach the Moon in about 35 minutes — a trip that took Apollo 11 roughly three days
A brain-computer interface has, for the first time, restored fluent everyday speech to a person who had lost it — a man with ALS who had not spoken aloud in years until a small implant from the BrainGate clinical trial began translating his attempts to speak directly into computer-synthesised words, in a result researchers reported in June 2026
In 2016, Reuters reporters legally purchased two human heads and a cervical spine from a Tennessee broker for $900 plus shipping, and no federal law was broken in the transaction.
A dying star might never collapse into a black hole — a tiny Big Bang could ignite at its core and leave a gravastar with no singularity and no event horizon
The dust in your home is not just dirt — it is a mixture of skin, fabric, pollen, soil, insects, microbes, smoke, and microscopic plastic, turning an ordinary windowsill into a quiet archive of what has entered the room
Some climate models suggest Venus could once have had liquid water and habitable temperatures, until a dramatic transformation hundreds of millions of years ago. One leading idea is that widespread volcanic resurfacing helped push the planet into the runaway greenhouse state that left it hotter than Mercury today.
We tend to think of AI as a software problem, weightless and waterless, but even a 100-word email written with ChatGPT has been estimated to require roughly a bottle’s worth of water once data-centre cooling and electricity generation are counted — and scaled to global demand, researchers project AI could withdraw 4.2 to 6.6 billion cubic metres of water a year by 2027, roughly half the United Kingdom’s annual freshwater withdrawals.
Most people alive today will live to see the Arctic Ocean lose its summer ice — for the first time since before our species left Africa, 115,000 years ago
By 2025, a 4,800-year-old bristlecone pine named Methuselah in California's White Mountains remained the oldest known non-clonal living tree, and the exact location of the gnarled, wind-stunted survivor is kept secret by the US Forest Service to protect it from vandals and souvenir hunters.
