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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Mercury is the Solar System’s smallest planet, but its metallic core fills about 85 per cent of its radius, leaving a rocky shell so thin that cooling has crumpled the surface into cliffs hundreds of kilometres long
Saudi Arabia sits on the world's largest sand desert and yet imports construction sand from Australia, because the wind-rounded grains of the Empty Quarter are too smooth to bind in concrete and modern construction needs the jagged sand pulled from riverbeds and quarries
The Greenland shark grows about one centimetre per year and does not reach sexual maturity until roughly age 150, meaning the pups being born in the North Atlantic this year will not breed until the 22nd century
In 1994, a bushwalker rappelling into a sandstone canyon 150 kilometres from Sydney found a stand of trees with waxy bubbled bark that matched fossils 90 million years old, and the Wollemi pine turned out to be a species everyone had assumed died with the dinosaurs
In 1977, Carl Sagan and Frank Drake sat in a Cornell office arguing over what to put on the Voyager Golden Record, and among the greetings in 55 languages, the whale song, and the Bach they included the sound of a young woman's brainwaves recorded while she thought about being in love.
On August 12, for the first time in 28 months, the Moon's shadow will sweep across Earth in a total solar eclipse over Greenland, Iceland and Spain — and just hours later, the Perseid meteor shower will peak under a moonless sky, setting up one of the most extraordinary nights of sky-watching in years
Every commercial jet flying today gets struck by lightning roughly once a year — a 200,000-ampere bolt courses through the fuselage and exits via the tail, and most passengers land at their destination never knowing it happened
The Soviet Buran shuttle flew exactly once, in November 1988, completing two unmanned orbits and landing itself in a crosswind on a Kazakh runway with such precision that engineers found it stopped within 3 metres of the centreline — and then the program was cancelled and the orbiter was crushed 14 years later when its hangar roof collapsed.
About 46,000 objects are now tracked around Earth, and roughly 30,000 are not functioning satellites — one collision can turn two of them into thousands, making orbital debris a risk that manufactures more of itself
Uranus rotates almost completely on its side, tipped by 97.77 degrees, most likely by a giant impact billions of years ago — but its tilted moons keep the case from being closed
