What's up in
Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were preparing to leave the Moon in July 1969, a Soviet robot called Luna 15 was descending toward another lunar sea in a final attempt to bring soil home first; it crashed after 52 orbits, ending a race that continued above the Moon even after Apollo 11 had landed
A bar-tailed godwit flew 7,250 miles nonstop from Alaska to New Zealand, going more than eight days without landing, eating or drinking
In February 1985, the Soviet space station Salyut 7 went silent and began tumbling with dead batteries, frozen instruments and frost covering its windows; four months later, two cosmonauts docked with the powerless 20-tonne station by hand, entered wearing gas masks and brought it back to life with flashlights and improvised wiring
Neptune has the strongest winds in the solar system, gusting past 1,200 miles an hour on a planet that gets barely a fraction of the sunlight Earth does
Astronomers have found the first stellar-mass black hole in Omega Centauri, locked with a star in a 94-year orbit — the longest-period black hole binary yet found
In December 1972, before he climbed the ladder of the Apollo 17 lunar module for the last time, Gene Cernan knelt in the grey dust of the Taurus-Littrow valley and traced his daughter Tracy's initials, TDC, into a surface with no wind or weather to erase them for millions of years
Have physicists caught the faint whisper of neutrinos from every supernova that ever exploded — a first hint, not yet a discovery?
As few as four or five raw or undercooked red kidney beans can trigger severe vomiting and diarrhoea — and the safest preparation is soaking them, then giving them a 30-minute rolling boil
When the sun, moon and Earth line up at new and full moon, their tidal pulls stack into the month's biggest highs and lowest lows — spring tides that are simply solar system geometry printed on a weekly tide table
For decades a single whale has called at a frequency no other whale answers, and no one can say whether it is truly alone or simply speaking a language the rest of the ocean cannot hear
