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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
A saltwater crocodile has the most powerful bite ever recorded in a living animal, strong enough to crush bone and hold prey with terrifying force — yet the muscles that open the same jaws are so weak a person can hold them shut with their hands
Scientists thought the exceptionally quiet Sun of 2008 might be slipping into a decades-long lull. Instead the trend reversed, and a NASA study published in September 2025 found that its underlying solar-wind activity has been strengthening for nearly two decades.
A telescope array still in early construction was pointed at the Helix Nebula and came back with 22 arcs of shocked gas in the faint outskirts — each one carved by an invisible clump of a dead star's ejecta that interstellar space is pulling apart
JWST found an object in the early universe whose dense hydrogen cocoon made it look eerily like an enormous star — until astronomers realized it was radiating roughly 100 billion times the Sun's luminosity, with a growing black hole hidden inside.
Right now, without moving a muscle, you are aboard a planet orbiting the Sun at 107,000 kilometres per hour, inside a solar system orbiting the galaxy at 720,000 kilometres per hour, while the Milky Way and Andromeda close on each other at roughly 400,000 kilometres per hour — and you cannot feel any of it.
A moon does not need sunlight to keep its interior warm. Io is ablaze with volcanoes, Europa hides an ocean, and Enceladus leaks heat and water from its south pole into space — worlds kept active by the gravitational grip of planets that never lets go.
In the 1970s, the CIA helped fund a classified psychic-research programme at Stanford Research Institute that later became STARGATE, spending roughly $20 million over two decades to test remote viewing — and ending with results too strange to dismiss cleanly, but too weak to prove psychic perception was real
Elephants in Kenya can distinguish between the voices of two local groups, reacting with fear to Maasai men, who have historically speared them, and staying calmer around Kamba voices — evidence that they are not just hearing humans, but learning which humans are dangerous
Astronomers traced just three stars flung out of the Large Magellanic Cloud and used them like cosmic breadcrumbs to reconstruct 800 million years of the galaxy's motion — narrowing its possible past trajectory by about 50%.
The James Webb Space Telescope has found an object from just 660 million years after the Big Bang that looks remarkably like a star but shines with roughly 100 billion times the Sun’s luminosity — far too bright to be powered by normal stellar fusion. The best explanation is a growing black hole wrapped in an extraordinarily dense hydrogen envelope spanning roughly the size of the Solar System.
