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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
How does a lake the size of Lake Ontario stay liquid under four kilometres of Antarctic ice, sealed away from sunlight and the atmosphere for something like fifteen million years?
We have more accurate maps of the surface of Mars and the Moon than of the floor of our own ocean — less than a third of the seabed has been measured in real detail, meaning most of the largest landscape on the planet has never been surveyed up close by a ship
On 1 September 1859 a solar storm hit Earth hard enough that auroras were seen over Cuba, and telegraph operators in Boston disconnected their batteries and kept sending messages for two hours on the current the sky was pushing through the wires.
Eighteen metres under a field in Romania sits a cave whose air no human can breathe for long — no light, a fraction of the oxygen up top, thick with the rotten-egg reek of hydrogen sulphide — and yet it holds dozens of pale, eyeless species that have fed on poison in total darkness for as long as five and a half million years
A woman who hadn't spoken an intelligible word in twenty years, silenced by a stroke, can form spoken sentences again — not by moving her mouth but through an experimental implant that reads the speech centres of her brain and turns her attempts to speak into a synthesised voice, almost in real time
In a University of Chicago lab, a rat left free to roam learned to open a tube and release a trapped cagemate, and when researchers added chocolate as a rival temptation, the rat opened both at much the same speed, then ate less of the chocolate than it would have eaten alone
A spider in the Himalayas wears the same red smiling face as Hawaii's famous happy-face spider — and its DNA marks it as a new species, not the Hawaiian one long thought to wear that grin alone
The software that landed men on the Moon was not loaded onto the Apollo Guidance Computer so much as woven into it, with women at a Raytheon plant threading wire through or around thousands of tiny magnetic rings by hand, one pass for a one and one miss for a zero, until the whole program was a physical textile
Opportunity was built for a ninety-day mission and a target of six hundred metres, and it ran for fourteen and a half years and forty-five kilometres, until a planet-wide dust storm in 2018 blotted out the sun over Perseverance Valley and its final transmission was a reading of falling power and darkening sky
How does a planet spin so slowly that a single day there lasts longer than its entire year, while the clouds above it race all the way around in just four days?
