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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
During World War II a US War Production Board memo accused the diamond cartel of intentionally risking Allied war production by refusing to release a stockpile of industrial diamonds America needed to machine its engines
Scientists say the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could collapse with very little additional warming and the four metres of sea level rise that would follow cannot be stopped once it begins
Two continent-sized structures named Tuzo and Jason sit nearly 1,800 miles beneath the surface of the Earth — one beneath the Pacific Ocean and the other beneath Africa — and have been holding their shape for at least 200 million years, in two of the largest single structures ever identified inside any planet, despite no one on the surface ever having seen them
GPS works because its satellites carry atomic clocks so precise that Einstein’s relativity has to be built into the system: without correcting for the roughly 38 microseconds per day that satellite clocks gain in orbit, navigation errors would build up by about 10 kilometres a day.
In late 2023, Voyager 1 began sending unreadable data from interstellar space. NASA engineers eventually traced the fault to corrupted memory in one of the probe’s computers, rewrote part of its 46-year-old software, transmitted the fix across more than 24 billion kilometres, and waited roughly 45 hours for confirmation that the patch had worked.
Point Nemo sits so far from any coastline that the closest humans to it are often the astronauts aboard the International Space Station passing overhead, not anyone standing on land.
In 1908, something exploded above the remote Siberian forest of Tunguska with enough force to flatten roughly 2,000 square kilometres of trees — and more than a century later, no impact crater has ever been found, because the object, probably a small asteroid, appears to have blown itself apart in the atmosphere.
An exoplanet with a daytime temperature hot enough to vaporize iron has methane on its nightside because of an atmospheric circulation that should not be able to exist at that heat
Bowhead whales can live past 200 years, and biologists studying their DNA have found unique gene variants for repairing damage that may explain why they almost never develop the cancers that kill most other large mammals before 80.
In 2002 astronomers averaged the light of 200,000 galaxies and announced the universe was pale turquoise — then traced the color to a software error and corrected it to a beige they nicknamed cosmic latte
