What's up in
Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Four dead stars have been confirmed within 65 light-years of Earth, hidden for decades in the glare of the brighter red dwarfs they orbit
Deep inside polar craters on Mercury, sunlight has never once fallen — and NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft confirmed in 2012 that those permanently shadowed floors hold ancient water ice, sitting metres from terrain hot enough to melt lead
In 1991, a single subatomic particle struck Earth carrying the kinetic energy of a fast-bowled cricket ball — tens of millions of times more than any human accelerator can give one proton — and physicists still cannot explain what launched it
In 2025, Antarctic drillers reached bedrock and recovered ice that fell as snow 1.2 million years ago — with the air of that vanished world still sealed inside it
Honey is so hostile to bacteria that hospitals keep a sterilised, medical-grade version on hand for stubborn wounds and burns — the same chemistry that let honey in ancient tombs stay edible for millennia now helps modern skin heal
Arctic ground squirrels drop their body temperature to nearly three degrees below freezing during hibernation — the coldest ever recorded in a mammal — a state that should crystallise their blood and kill them, but through a phenomenon called supercooling, their body fluids remain liquid, and they wake in spring unharmed
At the start of winter, the wood frog of North America stops breathing, lets ice form in the spaces between its cells, and its heart stops entirely for up to seven months — then in spring it thaws, its heart restarts, and it hops away as if nothing happened
Dermatologists have long documented that the expressions worn most often across a lifetime eventually stop leaving the face and start staying — thousands of repetitions of the same smile, frown, or squint pulling the same muscles until the skin above them slowly loses the ability to return to neutral
The search for alien radio signals from K2-18b, one of the most closely watched possible ocean worlds, came up empty after two of the most powerful arrays on Earth scanned it for a full orbit
Why did NASA deliberately crash a spacecraft into an asteroid 11 million kilometres away, and what happened when it hit?
