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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
In the summer of 1858, a lesser-known 35-year-old naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace mailed Charles Darwin a 20-page letter from the Indonesian jungle outlining the theory of evolution by natural selection — a theory Darwin had been quietly developing for 20 years without publishing — forcing Darwin to hastily share the credit with a man he had never met
The most powerful telescope ever built by human beings sits permanently parked 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, sheltered from the Sun by a folded shield the size of a tennis court — keeping one side of the spacecraft at minus 233 degrees Celsius while the other side reaches 85 degrees above zero, a temperature difference of more than 300 degrees across a single instrument that nobody can ever fly out to repair
In 1987, Costa Rica's forest cover had collapsed to roughly 21% of the country, and the mechanism that quietly reversed it over the next three decades was not a treaty but a small line item in the national tax on gasoline, paying private landowners to let the trees grow back
Some of the water sitting in your glass is older than the Sun having formed inside interstellar clouds billions of years before the solar system existed
For decades, scientists repeated as established fact that bacteria in the human body outnumber human cells ten to one — a 2016 study by the Weizmann Institute of Science reviewed the original source and found the actual ratio is closer to 1:1, making the figure one of the most widely cited errors in modern biology
Less than a third of the world's ocean floor has been mapped to modern standards, meaning humanity currently knows more about the surface of Mars than about the seabed covering two thirds of its own planet
When archaeologists excavating a Han Dynasty tomb near Changsha in 1971 opened the innermost of four nested coffins, they found the body of a noblewoman named Xin Zhui — who had died roughly 2,140 years ago — so perfectly preserved that her skin was still soft, her joints still moved, and her stomach still contained 138 melon seeds from her last meal, making it the best-preserved human body ever recovered from the ancient world
We tend to think of Earth’s atmosphere as a vast protective shield, but astronauts looking back from the ISS see something far more fragile: a thin blue-green line, like the skin of an apple wrapped around a basketball, separating every living thing we know from the complete inhospitality of space.
Most cat owners I know assume their older cat is just slowing down with age — veterinary research suggests up to 92% of cats over ten have arthritis, and most are hiding it
In September 2025, NASA announced that a Perseverance sample from a Mars rock called Cheyava Falls contained one of the strongest potential biosignatures yet found on the planet: evidence of ancient water, organic carbon, and chemical reactions that could have supplied energy for microbes, all preserved in a dried-up river valley.
