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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 2016, Reuters reporters legally purchased two human heads and a cervical spine from a Tennessee broker for $900 plus shipping, and no federal law was broken in the transaction.
A dying star might never collapse into a black hole — a tiny Big Bang could ignite at its core and leave a gravastar with no singularity and no event horizon
The dust in your home is not just dirt — it is a mixture of skin, fabric, pollen, soil, insects, microbes, smoke, and microscopic plastic, turning an ordinary windowsill into a quiet archive of what has entered the room
Some climate models suggest Venus could once have had liquid water and habitable temperatures, until a dramatic transformation hundreds of millions of years ago. One leading idea is that widespread volcanic resurfacing helped push the planet into the runaway greenhouse state that left it hotter than Mercury today.
We tend to think of AI as a software problem, weightless and waterless, but even a 100-word email written with ChatGPT has been estimated to require roughly a bottle’s worth of water once data-centre cooling and electricity generation are counted — and scaled to global demand, researchers project AI could withdraw 4.2 to 6.6 billion cubic metres of water a year by 2027, roughly half the United Kingdom’s annual freshwater withdrawals.
Most people alive today will live to see the Arctic Ocean lose its summer ice — for the first time since before our species left Africa, 115,000 years ago
By 2025, a 4,800-year-old bristlecone pine named Methuselah in California's White Mountains remained the oldest known non-clonal living tree, and the exact location of the gnarled, wind-stunted survivor is kept secret by the US Forest Service to protect it from vandals and souvenir hunters.
A self-taught Russian amateur astronomer named Filipp Romanov has been finding asteroids that NASA-funded sky-surveys missed — including a near-Earth asteroid he spotted in February 2026 before any of the professional systems noticed it — working from a village on Russia's Sea of Japan coast, and naming each new asteroid he finds after one of his great-grandparents
Beneath the streets of Naples lies a 2,400-year-old network of Greek and Roman tunnels and cisterns carved into soft volcanic tuff, and during World War II tens of thousands of residents sheltered in the same hollow chambers their ancestors had dug to quarry building stone.
New HIV infections fell by 40 percent between 2010 and 2024 and the number of people requiring treatment for neglected tropical diseases dropped by 36 percent in the same period, according to the World Health Statistics 2026 report — gains now at risk as the funding that built them comes under pressure
