What's up in
Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
In 1995, astronomers pointed Hubble at a patch of sky so dark it looked empty and held it there for ten days. The image that came back contained roughly 3,000 galaxies — not stars, but galaxies — many holding billions of stars of their own.
In April 2025, four private astronauts on SpaceX’s Fram2 mission became the first humans ever to circle Earth in a true polar orbit, flying directly over both poles — a route no government crewed space program had taken in more than six decades of human spaceflight.
In 1610, Galileo spotted a small, smooth moon circling Jupiter and wrote it down; four hundred years later, scientists confirmed it likely holds the largest ocean in the solar system, buried under ice and never once touched by sunlight
Solar storms puffed up Earth’s upper atmosphere enough to drag a $500 million NASA space telescope toward destruction, so engineers built a $30 million robotic rescuer in less than a year and launched it to grab the telescope before it burns up.
The oldest known image of the cosmos is a Bronze Age disc of bronze and gold, dug from a German hilltop by looters and recovered three years later in a Swiss police sting
The word algebra comes from the title of a book called Al-Jabr, written around the year 820 by a Persian mathematician named Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad — and the word algorithm comes from the Latinized version of his name
When Sony released a robotic dog called AIBO in Tokyo in May of 1999, the first batch of 3,000 units sold out online in 20 minutes — and today, more than 800 of those same AIBOs have been given traditional Buddhist funerals at a 450-year-old temple in Chiba Prefecture, where a priest chants sutras for the peaceful transition of their souls
Over six days in July of 1994, 21 fragments of a comet named Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed one after another into the atmosphere of Jupiter as telescopes across the world watched — the first time in recorded history that human beings had ever directly observed a collision between two bodies in the solar system
A freely swinging pendulum slowly turns the direction of its swing on its own — not because anything pushes it, but because the Earth is rotating beneath it, the effect Léon Foucault used in 1851 to let Paris watch the planet turn
A world just 25 light-years away sits in the narrow zone where liquid water could exist on its surface — and astronomers at UC Irvine have now revised its mass down to just 2.3 times Earth’s, making it look less like a gas-shrouded mini-Neptune and more like solid ground.
