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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
In 1971, Apollo 14 astronaut Stuart Roosa carried hundreds of tree seeds around the Moon in a metal canister inside his personal kit. When the seeds returned to Earth, many were germinated by the U.S. Forest Service and planted as “Moon Trees” — ordinary-looking trees that, decades later, showed no discernible difference from trees whose seeds had never left Earth.
The June Bootids have flared to dozens of meteors an hour in rare years like 1998, but most years the shower is so weak it shows almost nothing — and no outburst is forecast for 2026
No spacecraft has ever landed in the outer solar system — except one: the Huygens probe, which parachuted through Titan's orange haze in 2005 and touched down more than a billion kilometres from Earth in cold that dropped below minus 170 degrees Celsius
The Wright brothers made the first powered flight in 1903 and Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in 1969, close enough together that a single person could have witnessed both within one lifetime
Everyone with ordinary inherited blue eyes appears to share a common ancestor, probably someone who lived around 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, when a tiny genetic switch near the OCA2 gene reduced brown pigment in the iris — meaning blue eyes, as we know them today, may trace back to one ancient mutation.
Every time you give a deck of cards a proper shuffle you almost certainly create an order that has never existed before in the history of the universe, because the possible arrangements vastly outnumber the seconds since the Big Bang
Apollo 12 was struck by lightning twice in the first 52 seconds of flight, filling the spacecraft with warning lights and turning Mission Control’s data into nonsense — until a young controller named John Aaron recognised an obscure failure pattern and calmly said: “Try SCE to Aux.”
The notebooks Marie Curie used in her research remain radioactively contaminated more than a hundred years later. Some Curie papers have been found contaminated with radium-226, an isotope with a half-life of about 1,600 years, and original volumes are kept under strict radiation-protection controls before anyone can handle them.
In the weightlessness of orbit, an astronaut’s heart can become more spherical as it no longer works against gravity in the usual way, while their spine stretches enough to make them measurably taller before they return to Earth.
A Greenland shark studied in 2016 was estimated to be nearly 400 years old, meaning it may have been born around the time Shakespeare’s era was ending — and, astonishingly, would not have reached sexual maturity for more than another century.
