What's up in
Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
It takes BepiColombo more than eight years and nine planetary flybys to reach orbit around Mercury. The paradox is that getting closer to the Sun makes you faster, not slower — so the spacecraft has spent much of its journey shedding energy just to avoid screaming past the planet it was sent to study.
On 13 April 2029, a roughly 375-metre asteroid named Apophis will pass closer to Earth than some of our own satellites — just 32,000 kilometres above the surface — and new calculations suggest up to 90% of humanity could potentially see it cross the sky with the naked eye.
Japan is sending a spacecraft to land on Phobos, where gravity is about 1,700 times weaker than Earth’s. MMX will collect more than 10 grams of material and return it to Australia in 2031 — the first sample ever deliberately brought back to Earth from the Martian system.
Sea otters have the densest fur of any mammal on Earth, up to one million hairs per square inch, because unlike whales and seals they carry no insulating blubber and would freeze to death in the North Pacific without a coat that traps a layer of air against their skin
A radar aboard ESA’s Mars Express detected an extraordinarily bright reflection beneath 1.5 kilometres of Martian polar ice, spread across a patch roughly 20 kilometres wide. Years later, a second radar aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter finally reached the same layer — and saw only a faint echo, deepening a debate over whether there is liquid water, unusual rock, or something else beneath Mars’s south pole.
Vampire bats will regurgitate blood to save a starving roost-mate, even one they are not related to — then remember who helped them before, in a system of animal reciprocity that looks less like instinct than a tiny favour economy
NASA’s Viking 2 lander photographed frost forming on Mars in the 1970s. Nearly half a century later, a University of Arkansas researcher fed its old weather measurements into a model and found something Viking’s scientists never knew: for roughly 30 Martian days each year, the frost around the lander may have created tiny pools of liquid perchlorate brine.
Spotted hyenas evolved unusually large frontal brain regions and social skills that rival those of monkeys — even though their lineages split tens of millions of years ago. Researchers see it as convergent evolution: intelligence finding a similar solution twice.
Some of the most promising places to search for alien life aren't planets at all, but moons — because Europa and Enceladus keep oceans liquid beneath their ice partly through the gravitational squeezing of giant planets, an internal heat source that doesn't care how far they are from the Sun.
Solar power disappears every night, but a data centre cannot. That engineering mismatch is turning Google, Amazon and other technology giants into some of the world's most important buyers of battery storage, financing gigawatt-scale systems to keep increasingly power-hungry AI infrastructure supplied around the clock.
