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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
A 2025 MIT-led study mapped 32,000 skills across 923 occupations and found current AI tools can already perform work representing 11.7 per cent of America’s entire wage bill — about $1.2 trillion a year
The ancient Greeks calculated the circumference of the Earth around 240 BCE, using nothing more than a stick, the sun, and the distance between two Egyptian cities
A meteor shower named for a dragon once produced several thousand shooting stars an hour in 1946 — and its parent comet is nearing the sun again in 2026, though nowhere near as close to Earth as it's been
The pistol shrimp snaps its claw so fast it creates a collapsing cavitation bubble nearly as hot as the Sun’s surface — and kills with the shockwave, not the claw
Yawning may be the brain's way of cooling itself: in one experiment, people watching others yawn were far less likely to yawn when a cold pack was pressed to their forehead, but not when the pack was warm
In 1676 a Danish astronomer noticed the eclipses of Jupiter's moon Io kept arriving late as Earth pulled away, and used the delay to conclude that light does not travel instantly
Cuttlefish passed a version of the marshmallow test, waiting up to two minutes for a better meal, and the ones that held out longest also learned fastest
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
