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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
When Mariner 4 sent back the first close-up of Mars in 1965, the printer was too slow for the engineers waiting on it, so they pinned the raw numbers to a wall and coloured them in with pastels bought from an art shop down the road
Two and a half kilometres beneath the Antarctic ice, a cubic kilometre of frozen water has been wired with 5,160 light sensors, turning the South Pole itself into a telescope that looks down through the entire planet to catch particles arriving from the other side of the sky
The second closest potentially habitable planet to Earth is not around a famous star; it is GJ 887 d, confirmed in 2026 around a quiet red dwarf 10.7 light-years away - making GJ 887 d the second-closest known habitable-zone planet after Proxima Centauri b
A star near the centre of our galaxy reaches almost 3 per cent of the speed of light as it is whipped around something four million times the mass of the Sun that emits no light of its own — and tracking its orbit for nearly three decades helped two astronomers win a Nobel Prize
How does the closest planet to the Sun, with a surface that hits 430 degrees at noon, hold on to billions of tonnes of ice that never melt?
How does a pond in Antarctica sitting at minus 50 degrees refuse to freeze, year after year, while everything around it is solid ice?
A deep-water shark's liver can account for up to 30 per cent of its total body mass, and the oil inside it is what corrects for having no swim bladder: the liver is, functionally, the shark's buoyancy organ
A lion's tongue is covered in hollow, backward-pointing spines called papillae, widely credited with stripping flesh from bone and lifting hair from a hide: the same structure that makes a lick from a domestic cat feel like sandpaper
Did prehistoric humans actually live in caves?
In microgravity, the human spine lengthens by as much as five centimetres, and astronauts come home temporarily taller than when they left, before gravity compresses the column again within days of landing
