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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Travelling at the speed of light is not just hard but impossible for anything that has mass, since it would take infinite energy, so the real question is how close we could get and whether the loopholes physicists talk about are more than mathematics
A 2021 estimate suggested that about 2.5 billion Tyrannosaurus rex lived, while only 32 relatively well-preserved post-juvenile specimens were then held in public museums — roughly one for every 80 million animals. And T. rex is one of the better represented large theropods
Mars has such thin air that around noon near the equator, sunlit ground beneath your boots could reach 24 degrees Celsius while the air around your head remained below freezing — allowing one standing person to span temperatures resembling spring and winter at the same time.
Ganymede is a moon, yet it is larger than the planet Mercury, may contain more water than exists on Earth's surface, and even generates its own magnetic field, making it less like a conventional moon than a full-sized world that happens to orbit Jupiter.
Enceladus hides a salty ocean beneath its ice but also blasts that ocean directly into space, which means a spacecraft can test water from a potentially habitable sea simply by flying through the plume — no landing, drilling, or journey through kilometres of frozen crust required.
Asteroid Apophis, named for the Egyptian god of chaos, will pass closer to Earth on 13 April 2029 than many weather satellites do — roughly 32,000 kilometres from the surface — and up to 90% of the world's population may see it with the naked eye
Beneath a vast white salt flat in Bolivia lies the largest single-basin deposit of lithium on Earth, enough to help drive the world's shift to electric cars — and yet Bolivia pulls out less than one percent of global supply, sitting atop the greatest untapped store of 'white gold' while barely touching it
In 2031, a JAXA capsule is due to land in the Australian desert carrying more than ten grams of dust collected from Phobos. Mixed into that dust may be fragments blasted off ancient Mars—material that could preserve organic chemistry, or perhaps even traces of hypothetical Martian life from billions of years ago.
A Martian day runs 39 minutes and 35 seconds longer than an Earth day, so rover teams at JPL live on Mars time for the length of a mission, sliding their whole schedule later each day until they are eating breakfast at midnight, and their families describe it as jet lag with no destination
The International Space Station circles the planet every 92 minutes, so its crew passes through 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets in a single working day, and the only way human bodies cope is for the station to ignore all of it and run on Greenwich time with the window shades down
