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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
A cockroach can survive for about a week without its head, dying eventually of thirst rather than injury, because its open circulatory system and body-wide breathing let it function long after decapitation would kill a mammal
Mars once had a magnetic field strong enough to deflect solar wind, just as Earth's does now — when it collapsed, the planet lost its atmosphere and its oceans within a geologically brief period, transforming from a world that may have held life into the frozen desert it is today
Dark matter is thought to make up roughly 85 percent of all matter in the universe, yet after nearly four decades of increasingly sensitive searches — from deep underground detectors to space-based observations — not a single dark matter particle has ever been directly confirmed.
In the 1970s, Africa still held around 90,000 lions. Today, only about 20,000 to 25,000 remain — a collapse of roughly three-quarters in half a century — and the species now survives in less than 8% of the land it once roamed.
A horse can destroy a human in a sprint, but over a brutal long haul in summer heat, Daniel Lieberman argues the advantage can flip: humans keep cooling themselves through sweat, while a horse’s larger body struggles to shed heat fast enough.
Titan’s atmosphere is so dense and its gravity so weak that a person with the right winged suit could plausibly glide through its sky — and those same conditions make Titan one of the most forgiving large worlds in the solar system for a spacecraft to descend onto, even if the surface itself is colder than Antarctica by almost 100 degrees Celsius.
The highest mountain on Earth is not the closest mountain to outer space — because the planet bulges outward at the equator, the summit of a volcano in Ecuador called Chimborazo sits farther from the center of the Earth than Mount Everest does, even though Everest is much taller
Sharks have survived every mass extinction for roughly 450 million years, outlasting the dinosaurs by a vast margin — yet a 2025 global study found that more than a third of shark species alive today are severely threatened, mostly by fishing nets and finning
On an island in the Indian Ocean about the size of Manhattan, roughly 50 to 200 people known as the Sentinelese live in complete voluntary isolation — hunting with bows and arrows, speaking a language no outsider has ever understood, and killing every visitor who has come ashore, including an American missionary in 2018
The James Webb Space Telescope has detected the same unexplained absorption signal on the surfaces of Pluto and Titan — two frozen worlds with very different environments but methane-and-nitrogen chemistry in common — and so far, scientists cannot match it to any confirmed molecule in the lab.
