What's up in
Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
We tend to think Everest is the tallest mountain on Earth, but if you measure from the centre of the planet rather than from sea level, a volcano in Ecuador called Chimborazo wins by more than two kilometres
Every Antarctic winter, male emperor penguins stand for more than two months in temperatures down to minus 50 degrees Celsius, balancing a single egg on their feet — and eating nothing the entire time
A near-Earth asteroid tracked since 1998 turned up far from its predicted spot in the sky, and astronomers have now confirmed why — it is secretly a comet, nudged off its path by escaping gas, with a tail too faint for ordinary telescopes to see
The Voyager Golden Record carries a small sample of uranium on its cover, placed there so whoever finds it can measure the decay and work out how long it has been drifting — a built-in clock for any civilisation that discovers it
A polar bear’s fur looks white, but it contains no white pigment: its long guard hairs are transparent, hollow tubes that scatter light like crushed ice, while the skin underneath is black, helping absorb what little Arctic sunlight reaches it
A black bear's heart drops from roughly 55 beats per minute to as few as 8 during hibernation, yet it emerges in spring with almost no muscle or bone loss: a biological trick space agencies are studying to protect astronauts on long missions
Deep beneath Svalbard in a frozen Norwegian mountain, a vault holds seeds from almost every food crop on Earth: not as a museum piece, but as the working backup for the world's fragile seed banks
Every winter, a single beluga whale in the Arctic will dive to 700 metres and stay under for 25 minutes on a lungful of air compressed to 1/70th its surface volume, sustained by muscles so oxygen-rich they run nearly black when cut
Caribou in northern Canada travel up to 5,000 kilometres a year, a rhythm so reliable that Indigenous communities structured entire calendars around it for thousands of years, and one that has shifted by weeks in the last two decades as tundra temperatures change
A black hole does not merely bend space; it bends time, pulling it so severely that at the event horizon, time as experienced from the outside appears to stop entirely, meaning something falling in would seem, to a distant observer, to freeze at the edge
