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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 blue color of the sky is not a property of the air itself — air is colorless, and a glass of it would look exactly like a glass of nothing — and the blue you see overhead is sunlight being scattered by molecules of nitrogen and oxygen, which deflect short blue wavelengths much more strongly than long red ones, in the same physics that makes the Sun appear yellow and a sunset appear red
In December 1938 a museum curator sifting through a fisherman's catch in a South African port lifted out a heavy blue fish that science had known only from fossils and presumed extinct since the age of the dinosaurs
In 1971, a team of Soviet geologists in Turkmenistan's Karakum Desert set a collapsed gas crater alight and assumed the flames would burn out within weeks, but more than five decades later the pit travelers now call the Door to Hell is still throwing orange light across the dunes every night
The deepest point in the ocean, Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, sits nearly 11 kilometres below the surface — a depth so extreme that if Everest were dropped into it, the peak would still be covered by more than two kilometres of water
In 1835 the New York Sun told readers the Moon was full of life, from winged man-bats to bison — and pinned the discovery on a real astronomer who never said any of it
A species of jellyfish called Turritopsis dohrnii can revert its adult cells back to a juvenile polyp stage when injured or starved, effectively rebooting its life cycle, and biologists have watched it perform this reversal indefinitely under laboratory conditions
The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, discovered on July 1, 2025, by a survey telescope in Chile, is now believed by astronomers at Oxford to be roughly 7 billion years old — meaning it was already drifting through the Milky Way for nearly 3 billion years before our solar system even existed — having formed in a part of the galaxy called the thick disk, where the stars are older than almost everything else humanity has ever observed
Six men spent 520 days sealed inside a fake spacecraft that never moved, and by the end some had drifted so far out of sync that they were sleeping while the others were awake — exactly the kind of breakdown mission scientists were watching for.
The Moon is so far from Earth that, using its average distance, you could line up every other planet in the solar system between us and still have about 4,400 kilometres left over.
Antarctica's Blood Falls runs red because iron-rich brine reddens on contact with the air
