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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 tomb chamber of China's first emperor has never been opened in the 2,200 years since his death in 210 BC — sealed beneath a 76-metre pyramid mound outside Xi'an, surrounded by 8,000 life-sized terracotta soldiers discovered in 1974 by farmers digging a well, and described by ancient texts as containing rivers of mercury that modern soil readings around the mound have now quietly confirmed
Astronauts returning from spacewalks report that space carries a distinct smell of seared steak and hot metal that clings to their suits once they climb back inside
In 1977, a Hawaii guru named Chris Butler broke from the Hare Krishna movement and built a parallel sect whose members were instructed to enter politics under their own names
Hundreds of preserved dinosaur footprints — left by giant sauropods and a meat-eating Megalosaurus walking across a soft muddy lagoon roughly 166 million years ago — were uncovered in Oxfordshire, England in 2025, in tracks so well preserved that paleontologists can measure the individual stride lengths of animals that walked the Earth before the first flowers had ever evolved
In the Arctic wilderness near Russia's border with Norway, sealed beneath a welded steel cover bolted into the ground, sits the deepest hole human beings have ever drilled into the Earth — a 9-inch-wide shaft called the Kola Superdeep Borehole, plunging 7.6 miles down through 2.7 billion years of rock, abandoned in 1992 when the temperature at the bottom reached 356°F and the rocks themselves began to flow like plastic
In the limestone mountains of the Black Sea coast, deep beneath a single mountain range in the Caucasus, sits a vertical chasm called Veryovkina that plunges 2,212 metres into the Earth — roughly seven times the height of the Eiffel Tower straight down — and reaching its bottom requires a four-day descent through near-freezing waterfalls, vertical shafts, and absolute darkness so complete that explorers report their brains begin hallucinating light in the deepest chambers.
There are roughly 4,400 tiny explosions happening inside your body every second, as atoms of radioactive potassium quietly decay in your muscles and tissues right now — you have been faintly radioactive your entire life, and you will be for all of it
The default mode network burns 20% of the brain's energy doing nothing in particular — and Marcus Raichle only found it in 2001 because PET scanners kept showing the same regions lighting up between tasks
The universe is not only expanding — its expansion is accelerating. After decades of searching, physicists still do not know what is causing it. The name they gave the mystery, dark energy, is less an explanation than a placeholder for one of the biggest gaps in modern cosmology.
We tend to think of Neanderthals as a species that went extinct, but a Princeton geneticist found evidence of three waves of interbreeding over 250,000 years, leading him to argue Neanderthals didn't disappear — they were absorbed into us
