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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
For 21 years, Voyager 1’s primary roll thrusters were considered dead. Then in 2025, NASA tried to wake them up from 15 billion miles away — knowing that if they fired cold, they could explode, but if they stayed dead, the spacecraft might one day lose its aim at Earth forever.
The Sturtian glaciation, the longest Snowball Earth event, lasted about 57 million years — almost as long as the age of mammals after the dinosaurs vanished — yet new research from Scottish rocks shows that during at least one brief “slushy” interval, seasons, solar cycles and even El Niño-like rhythms were still pulsing through the frozen planet.
Scientists initially weighed the planet GJ 3378b at 5.3 Earth masses, a number that made it a likely gas world with crushing pressure — but 137 fresh telescope measurements revised that down to 2.3, nudging it across the boundary into rocky, potentially life-bearing territory
A Jupiter-sized planet outlived its dying star, and NASA’s Webb has now read its atmosphere — the first ever detected on a world orbiting a white dwarf
A single ten-month run added 161 gravitational-wave detections and pushed the total ever recorded to 390 — including two mergers that may be black holes built from earlier black holes
On 13 April 2029, a 375-metre asteroid called Apophis will sweep past Earth closer than many telecommunications satellites — and, under clear dark skies, around two billion people across Europe, Africa and parts of Asia may be able to watch it move across the night sky with the naked eye.
A 10-millimetre dung beetle called Onthophagus taurus can pull 1,141 times its own body weight — the equivalent of a 70-kilogram person dragging about 80 tonnes, roughly the weight of six double-decker buses.
In 1847 a Vienna doctor cut childbed-fever deaths on the doctors' ward from about one mother in ten to roughly one in eighty by making physicians wash their hands in chlorine — and the profession turned on him for it
The Sun accounts for 99.86 percent of all the mass in the entire solar system — meaning that if you took all eight planets, every one of their moons, every asteroid, and every comet, and combined them into a single object, that object would weigh less than one seven-hundredth of the Sun
Stand up too fast and the stars filling your vision aren't imaginary — a brief drop in blood pressure starves the retina for a heartbeat or two, and the light-detecting cells sputter out phantom light
