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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Werner Heisenberg nearly failed his 1923 PhD oral because he could not explain the resolving power of a microscope—or even how a storage battery worked. Experimental physicist Wilhelm Wien wanted to fail him, but his mentor Arnold Sommerfeld defended his brilliance as a theorist, securing a mediocre cum laude—four years before Heisenberg used a microscope thought experiment to explain the uncertainty principle.
Astronomers already knew the Milky Way’s magnetic field reverses near the Sagittarius Arm, but a new 2026 three-dimensional model revealed the boundary’s unexpected shape: not a vertical wall between spiral arms, but a tilted magnetic plane slicing diagonally through the Galactic disc and passing just above our own region of space.
Nearly every element in your body except hydrogen was forged by stars—the calcium in your bones and much of the iron in your blood came through ancient supernovae, while the hydrogen flowing through you was born before the first star existed.
One of England's rarest moths had not been recorded on a Northumberland estate since 1952, and the conservationist who had been hunting a second English colony since 2004 found his first moth there about ten minutes after he arrived, in habitat that did not look like what the team expected
Star formation across the cosmos has fallen by roughly 59 per cent in 4.5 billion years, yet its reservoir of neutral atomic hydrogen declined by only about 11 to 26 per cent—a mismatch that rules out rapid loss of atomic gas as the primary cause and shifts the mystery to how galaxies convert that gas into star-forming molecular clouds.
Cassini logged 67 crossings of the funnel where the solar wind reaches Saturn, and after the count was divided by how long the spacecraft spent looking, the peak sat in the afternoon instead of at noon where Earth's cusp sits — three crossings turned up past dusk
To assemble a set of guaranteed fakes, researchers walked into Jerusalem souvenir shops and bought tourist pottery off the shelf, added known forgeries to the pile, and tested the lot against pottery excavated from Iron Age Judah — a bake at 112°C now tells them apart
The AI boom is pushing data-centre emissions higher while simultaneously accelerating America’s solar buildout: data centres could generate nearly half of US electricity-demand growth through 2030, prompting tech companies and utilities to commission vast new renewable projects—even as natural gas supplies much of the power that solar cannot provide around the clock.
America's first reconnaissance satellite began as range calculations an engineer penciled on a paper placemat while snowed into a Pennsylvania restaurant, and when it reached orbit in June 1960 its cover story was a real scientific experiment, one whose purpose was to measure radiation from the Sun
Deep in the Amazon, researchers found birds and monkeys passing predator warnings from one species to another — a single alarm can ripple through the canopy as other animals hear it, react and pass the danger on
