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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station can see flashes of light even with their eyes closed — not from light entering the eye, but from high-energy space particles passing through their body and triggering the retina or visual pathway directly.
Tibetan people can live at altitudes above 4,000 metres where many humans struggle with thin air, and one of the genetic tricks that helps them do it did not arise in Tibetans alone: a 2014 Nature study found that a key high-altitude variant near EPAS1 was inherited from Denisovans, an extinct group of archaic humans who interbred with our ancestors.
The spider hides by pretending to be the fungus that kills its neighbors, and it took scientists this long to notice because science had no category for an animal that imitates a disease
Naked mole rats almost never get cancer and routinely live more than thirty years — roughly ten times longer than any other rodent their size — and researchers in October 2025 finally identified one of the key mechanisms: a handful of tiny mutations in a single gene that powers DNA repair in the mole rats but suppresses it in humans
Mars wasn’t always the frozen desert we see today. The evidence now suggests it once had rivers, long-lived lakes, and possibly a northern ocean — for a stretch of time longer than complex animals have existed on Earth.
Most of an octopus's brain cells live in its arms, not in its head — only about 8 percent of its 500 million neurons sit inside the central brain, with the rest spread across the eight arms and the optic lobes behind its eyes, in a body design some neuroscientists describe as the closest thing to an alien mind humanity has ever studied
In 1944, Neal Miller harnessed hungry rats in a runway and watched them pull harder toward the food the closer they got — and harder away from the shock, with avoidance climbing steepest exactly where the reward sat, the gradient the British psychologist Jeffrey Gray later mapped to a septo-hippocampal brake
Olive oil flavoured with oregano was recovered from clay jars sealed inside a Greek merchant ship that sank in the Aegean roughly 2,400 years ago during the lifetime of Socrates — meaning the salad dressing sitting on a table at your nearest Mediterranean uses roughly the same recipe
In 1872, Charles Darwin catalogued the facial muscles of suppressed rage — the corrugator above the brow, the masseter at the jaw, the platysma down the neck — and the 'antithesis principle' he proposed still underpins how clinicians read a calm face today
For 400 years, sailors crossing parts of the Indian Ocean have reported patches of sea glowing pale white from horizon to horizon, until satellite imagery finally captured the phenomenon and suggested it is likely the light of trillions of microscopic bioluminescent bacteria switching on at once
