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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 record Apollo 13 set for the farthest humans had ever travelled from Earth was never meant to be a record — it was a survival manoeuvre after an explosion, and Artemis II quietly surpassed it on a clear April morning in 2026
NASA has already watched dormant herpes viruses, including the one behind chickenpox and shingles, reactivate in astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Artemis II has now carried that question into deep space: more than 252,000 miles from Earth, the crew collected saliva samples to test whether radiation, isolation and distance trigger the same hidden immune response beyond low Earth orbit.
On November 14, 2004, a Top Gun graduate named Commander David Fravor flying off the coast of San Diego encountered a smooth white 40-foot object shaped like a Tic Tac candy that hovered above a churning patch of ocean — and when he tried to close on it, the object mirrored his flight path and accelerated beyond visual range in seconds
The little blue pill prescribed today around the world for erectile dysfunction was originally developed in the early 1990s by Pfizer as a treatment for chest pain — and during the early trials, the male volunteers reported a side effect they were extremely reluctant to give up.
Sister Mary, a Catholic nun who belonged to the School Sisters of Notre Dame and died at 101 with her memory and reasoning fully intact, was one of 678 nuns enrolled in a 30-year study of brain aging by the American researcher David Snowdon — and her autopsy revealed a brain riddled with the plaques and tangles of advanced Alzheimer's disease
In 1977, a team of American marine geologists in a small research submarine descended to the seafloor of the Galápagos Rift and discovered something no biology textbook on Earth had ever predicted — an entire thriving ecosystem of giant tube worms, ghostly white crabs, and microbial life sustained not by sunlight but by heat and chemicals leaking out of the planet's interior
For centuries, European sailors told stories of a sea monster called the kraken — a vast tentacled creature that dragged ships down into the deep — and although marine biologists confirmed in the 1850s that the kraken was a real animal they named the giant squid, no one managed to photograph a living one until two Japanese scientists succeeded in September 2004
In April 2026, four Artemis II astronauts flew farther from Earth than any humans in history, reaching 406,771 kilometres from home — breaking a record Apollo 13 had held since 1970, without Artemis II ever landing on the Moon.
In an ancient Martian river channel, Perseverance drilled into a mudstone called Cheyava Falls and found tiny “leopard spot” minerals tangled with organic carbon — patterns that, on Earth, can be left behind when microbes consume organic matter, though scientists still can’t rule out non-living chemistry.
The many-worlds interpretation tackles one of physics’ hardest puzzles — why quantum objects seem to stop behaving like waves when they are measured — by arguing that they never stop at all: every possible outcome happens, but we only experience the branch we end up in.
