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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
We tend to think of Jupiter as permanently giant, but a 2025 study found it used to be twice its current size, with a magnetic field 50 times more powerful, and it is still quietly shrinking by about 2 centimetres every year
Experienced birdwatchers were found to have denser, more structurally complex brain tissue in regions linked to attention and perception, and when shown birds they had never seen before, those same regions activated most strongly
For 21 years, Voyager 1’s primary roll thrusters were considered dead. Then in 2025, NASA tried to wake them up from 15 billion miles away — knowing that if they fired cold, they could explode, but if they stayed dead, the spacecraft might one day lose its aim at Earth forever.
The Sturtian glaciation, the longest Snowball Earth event, lasted about 57 million years — almost as long as the age of mammals after the dinosaurs vanished — yet new research from Scottish rocks shows that during at least one brief “slushy” interval, seasons, solar cycles and even El Niño-like rhythms were still pulsing through the frozen planet.
Scientists initially weighed the planet GJ 3378b at 5.3 Earth masses, a number that made it a likely gas world with crushing pressure — but 137 fresh telescope measurements revised that down to 2.3, nudging it across the boundary into rocky, potentially life-bearing territory
A Jupiter-sized planet outlived its dying star, and NASA’s Webb has now read its atmosphere — the first ever detected on a world orbiting a white dwarf
A single ten-month run added 161 gravitational-wave detections and pushed the total ever recorded to 390 — including two mergers that may be black holes built from earlier black holes
On 13 April 2029, a 375-metre asteroid called Apophis will sweep past Earth closer than many telecommunications satellites — and, under clear dark skies, around two billion people across Europe, Africa and parts of Asia may be able to watch it move across the night sky with the naked eye.
A 10-millimetre dung beetle called Onthophagus taurus can pull 1,141 times its own body weight — the equivalent of a 70-kilogram person dragging about 80 tonnes, roughly the weight of six double-decker buses.
In 1847 a Vienna doctor cut childbed-fever deaths on the doctors' ward from about one mother in ten to roughly one in eighty by making physicians wash their hands in chlorine — and the profession turned on him for it
