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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
The footprints left by Apollo astronauts on the lunar surface will remain there, undisturbed, for at least ten million years — there is no wind, no rain, and almost nothing to erase them
The largest known volcano in the solar system is on Mars, and it is so wide that if you stood on its summit, you might not realise you were on a volcano at all — Olympus Mons rises from a base roughly the size of New Mexico, with slopes so gentle they would barely feel like a mountain.
Saturn’s rings may be far younger than the planet itself — Cassini-era estimates have placed their age anywhere from about 10 million to a few hundred million years, meaning the rings we see today may not have existed for most of the age of dinosaurs.
In 1995, astronomers pointed Hubble at a patch of sky so dark it looked empty and held it there for ten days. The image that came back contained roughly 3,000 galaxies — not stars, but galaxies — many holding billions of stars of their own.
In April 2025, four private astronauts on SpaceX’s Fram2 mission became the first humans ever to circle Earth in a true polar orbit, flying directly over both poles — a route no government crewed space program had taken in more than six decades of human spaceflight.
In 1610, Galileo spotted a small, smooth moon circling Jupiter and wrote it down; four hundred years later, scientists confirmed it likely holds the largest ocean in the solar system, buried under ice and never once touched by sunlight
Solar storms puffed up Earth’s upper atmosphere enough to drag a $500 million NASA space telescope toward destruction, so engineers built a $30 million robotic rescuer in less than a year and launched it to grab the telescope before it burns up.
The oldest known image of the cosmos is a Bronze Age disc of bronze and gold, dug from a German hilltop by looters and recovered three years later in a Swiss police sting
The word algebra comes from the title of a book called Al-Jabr, written around the year 820 by a Persian mathematician named Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad — and the word algorithm comes from the Latinized version of his name
When Sony released a robotic dog called AIBO in Tokyo in May of 1999, the first batch of 3,000 units sold out online in 20 minutes — and today, more than 800 of those same AIBOs have been given traditional Buddhist funerals at a 450-year-old temple in Chiba Prefecture, where a priest chants sutras for the peaceful transition of their souls
