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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
The Soviet Venera 13 lander parachuted through the sulphuric acid clouds of Venus in March 1982 and touched down in a landscape hot enough to melt lead, transmitted the first colour photographs of the surface for 127 minutes before the pressure crushed it, and along the way recorded the wind — the only audio anyone has ever captured from another planet's surface
Bristlecone pines growing in the White Mountains of California include one individual that germinated around 3050 BCE, meaning it was already 500 years old when the first stones of the Great Pyramid at Giza were cut, and it is still putting out needles this year
Off the coast of Japan, a jellyfish smaller than a fingernail called Turritopsis dohrnii responds to injury or starvation by collapsing back into a blob on the seafloor and regrowing into a juvenile polyp, effectively resetting its life cycle with no known upper limit on how many times it can do it
Starship's 33 engines push down with 74,400 kilonewtons at liftoff — roughly twice the force of the Saturn V that sent humans to the Moon, yet the whole vehicle is designed to be caught like a falling pencil and flown again the next day
JWST has spent four years revealing an early universe that galaxy-formation models did not expect: within a few hundred million years of the Big Bang, galaxies were already forming stars faster, shining brighter and appearing in greater numbers than most pre-Webb predictions — challenging the astrophysics built around ΛCDM, though not yet ΛCDM itself.
Enceladus appears to have almost everything life should need — water, chemistry, hydrothermal energy and an ocean capable of lasting geological ages. If we search it thoroughly and find nothing alive, that failure may become one of astrobiology’s most important discoveries: evidence that habitability alone is not enough to make life happen.
Migrating birds may see Earth’s magnetic field superimposed on the world around them — the result, scientists suspect, of a quantum reaction inside light-sensitive proteins in their eyes called cryptochromes.
Gypsum crystals discovered by Zhurong on roughly 760-million-year-old Martian terrain may still contain microscopic pockets of the brine they grew from — tiny sealed samples that could preserve the chemistry of liquid water from a surprisingly recent chapter of Mars’s history.
A planet called GJ 3378b, just 25 light-years away in Camelopardalis, receives about 90 percent as much starlight as Earth — and astronomers revealed this June that its estimated mass is less than half what they previously thought, transforming it from a possible gaseous world into a much stronger candidate for a rocky, potentially habitable planet.
A squid pulled from a sperm whale's stomach during an Antarctic whaling expedition in 1955–56 sat overlooked in scientific collections for nearly 70 years — until researchers realised it wasn't just a new species, but an entirely new family of oceanic squid no one knew existed.
