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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
On July 1, 2026, the company once known as Maxar began selling 3D maps of Earth it can refresh within a day or sharpen to 15 centimeters, built less for people to study than for the autonomous drones and weapons that navigate by matching their cameras against the terrain
Physics says time travel into the future is not a thought experiment — every astronaut who has orbited Earth has returned a fraction of a second younger than they would have been if they had stayed on the ground
In November 2025, UC Irvine astronomers announced a rocky super-Earth called GJ 251 c orbiting in a habitable zone less than 20 light-years away — close enough that the next generation of ground-based telescopes may actually photograph it directly
Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics, but not for relativity. The Nobel Committee avoided honouring that still-controversial theory directly, and instead awarded him for his work on the photoelectric effect — the discovery that helped launch quantum physics.
The International Space Station is not held up by rockets. It is falling constantly, in a precise arc that matches the curvature of Earth — a controlled fall that has continued without interruption since November 2000
In nearly seventy years of deep-sea exploration, researchers compiled 43,681 submersible dive records — and found that humans have visually observed less than 0.001% of the deep seafloor, an area roughly the size of Rhode Island, according to a Science Advances study published in May 2025.
We have mapped the surface of Mars, the Moon and Venus in sharper detail than the floor of our own ocean, most of which no human instrument has ever seen up close
Pluto was discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh, a 24-year-old Kansas farm boy with no formal astronomy degree, who had taught himself the sky and built his own telescopes by grinding mirrors from salvaged parts — before Lowell Observatory hired him as a young assistant to search for Planet X.
A neutron star can pack more mass than our entire Sun into a sphere only about 20 kilometres across — roughly the size of a city — and a teaspoon of its material would weigh about a billion tonnes on Earth, more than every human being alive combined.
Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in August 2012, yet it remains inside the gravitational reach of our Sun — true departure from the solar system, via the Oort Cloud, won't happen for 30,000 years
