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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Sharks are roughly 450 million years old — older than trees, older than forests, older than the first broad leaves. When they first appeared, life on land was still mostly low, simple mats of early plants, and nothing had yet learned how to grow into a forest.
When the Soviet Union launched Laika aboard Sputnik 2 in 1957, the world was told she had survived for days. Decades later, the truth emerged: she had died within hours, after the capsule overheated in orbit.
Finnish researchers tracked babies napping outdoors at minus 5°C and found they slept up to 90 minutes longer than indoors
The bootlace worm found washed up on Scottish beaches after storms can stretch more than 55 metres when relaxed, making it longer than the largest blue whale, and it secretes a mucus laced with a neurotoxin that paralyses crabs and kills cockroaches in lab tests
The first dinosaur bone ever discovered on the continent of Antarctica was confirmed last week, forty years after it was picked up on the Antarctic Peninsula in 1985 and stored in a museum drawer in Cambridge — a tail vertebra from a titanosaur, the group that included the largest animals ever to walk on land
Within the first few months of life, every bottlenose dolphin invents a unique whistle that becomes its name for the rest of its life — and other dolphins learn that whistle, remember it, and use it to call out to that specific individual, making bottlenose dolphins the first non-human species ever discovered to use personal names
A Hungarian biochemist named Katalin Karikó, who smuggled her family's savings inside her daughter's teddy bear to escape communist Hungary in 1985, spent the next thirty years being demoted, defunded, and rejected for her work on messenger RNA — and her ignored research became the foundation of the COVID vaccines administered to billions of people
The coldest known place in the universe is the outflow of a dying star, chilled to one degree above absolute zero — colder than the afterglow of the Big Bang
In 1868 astronomers found a new element in the Sun's light, named it helium for the Greek word for the Sun, and no one found a trace of it on Earth for another 27 years
When a shark bites down on a hagfish, the fish floods its attacker's mouth with slime in a fraction of a second, clogging the predator's gills until it gags and lets go
