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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
For the 2014 film Interstellar, director Christopher Nolan hired Caltech physicist Kip Thorne as his science consultant — and the visual simulations Thorne helped design for the film's black hole were so mathematically accurate that they generated two peer-reviewed scientific papers and became the model for how astrophysicists visualize black holes today
In 1912, the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener proposed that the continents of the Earth had once been joined and were slowly drifting apart — a theory geologists ridiculed for the next 50 years, until three decades after his death, when new evidence from the ocean floor proved him right
Scientists have now made the most comprehensive tally yet of deep-sea exploration — 43,681 dive records dating back to 1958 — and found that humans have directly seen less than 0.001% of the deep ocean floor, an area roughly the size of Rhode Island, leaving the vast seafloor across 66% of Earth’s surface essentially unobserved.
A University of Washington researcher published a finding in 2025 that stops you cold: blue whales sing at frequencies so deep that killer whales, their only natural predator, cannot hear them at all — their calls are invisible to orca ears beyond one kilometre
A whippet can accelerate from a standstill to 56 kilometres per hour in just a few strides — not by running harder than other dogs, but by leaving the ground twice in every single stride
A 2013 study found that bottlenose dolphins could recognise the signature whistles of former companions they had not heard for more than 20 years — one of the longest social memories ever documented in a non-human animal.
For much of the past century, scientists believed dinosaurs were already in decline when the asteroid struck 66 million years ago — but a 2025 study published in Science found fossils in New Mexico showing they were flourishing in diverse, thriving ecosystems right up until the moment of impact
Cooling a data centre on Earth can consume 10 to 30 per cent of its energy budget and millions of litres of water; in orbit, there is no air, no cooling towers, and no river to dump heat into — only vast radiator panels bleeding waste heat away as infrared light into the blackness of space
The debate over how many Earth-like planets exist has a wide range — from one, if the Rare Earth hypothesis is right, to something approaching a hundred quintillion, if Milky Way rates hold across the universe's roughly two trillion galaxies — and both answers are supported by serious researchers
Saturn used to be listed with 83 moons. Then astronomers looked harder, found dozens more, and by 2026 the count had exploded to 285 — so many that Saturn now has nearly three times as many confirmed moons as Jupiter.
