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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
In 1991, hikers in the Alps found a body melting out of a glacier and called the police, assuming it was a lost mountaineer — it turned out to be a 5,300-year-old man with 61 tattoos, an unfinished bow, and an arrowhead lodged in his shoulder, making his death the world's oldest open murder investigation
Voyager 2 discovered ten moons when it flew past Uranus in 1986. Nearly 40 years later, James Webb found one it missed: Uranus's 29th known moon, a tiny world only about 10 kilometres wide hiding among the planet's inner moons.
Capybaras and caimans doze inches apart on the same riverbanks across South America, and researchers say the famous truce has nothing to do with friendship — it's a cold calculation that a biting, 45-kilogram rodent simply costs more than it's worth
A PhD student in Sydney just found a “Rosetta Stone” for years of unexplained radio bursts from the Milky Way: a dead star is stripping material from its companion in a 1.4-hour orbit, giving astronomers their clearest look yet at what produces at least some of these mysterious signals.
Pluto has a blue twilight: when New Horizons looked back after its 2015 flyby and saw the dwarf planet backlit by the Sun, its atmospheric haze turned out to scatter sunlight blue — a colour that surprised even the mission’s scientists.
The Moon’s far side is not darker, but it is rougher: its crust is about 60 kilometres thick versus 40 on the Earth-facing side, so ancient impacts struggled to punch through and flood it with the dark lava seas that made the familiar face we see
Neptune sits thirty times farther from the Sun than Earth yet radiates about 2.5 times more energy than it receives — the hidden heat beneath the coldest reaches of the planetary system remains uncertain, even as it helps distinguish Neptune from its strangely quiet twin, Uranus
Jupiter pulls so hard on Io that the moon’s solid ground rises and falls by as much as 100 metres every orbit — a tide in rock the height of a 30-storey building, and the repeated flexing powers the most volcanically active world in the Solar System
NASA plans to send a working nuclear reactor toward Mars in late 2028. Space Reactor-1 Freedom will split uranium atoms in deep space to generate electricity for its engines — the first test of a technology NASA hopes will eventually help power human missions across the Solar System.
Earth’s atmosphere does not end anywhere near the edge of space: a ghostly hydrogen cloud called the geocorona stretches 630,000 kilometres out — far enough to envelop the Moon and make every lunar mission, technically, a journey through the outermost air of home
