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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.


The deepest point in the ocean, Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, sits nearly 11 kilometres below the surface — a depth so extreme that if Everest were dropped into it, the peak would still be covered by more than two kilometres of water

In 1835 the New York Sun told readers the Moon was full of life, from winged man-bats to bison — and pinned the discovery on a real astronomer who never said any of it

A species of jellyfish called Turritopsis dohrnii can revert its adult cells back to a juvenile polyp stage when injured or starved, effectively rebooting its life cycle, and biologists have watched it perform this reversal indefinitely under laboratory conditions

The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, discovered on July 1, 2025, by a survey telescope in Chile, is now believed by astronomers at Oxford to be roughly 7 billion years old — meaning it was already drifting through the Milky Way for nearly 3 billion years before our solar system even existed — having formed in a part of the galaxy called the thick disk, where the stars are older than almost everything else humanity has ever observed

Six men spent 520 days sealed inside a fake spacecraft that never moved, and by the end some had drifted so far out of sync that they were sleeping while the others were awake — exactly the kind of breakdown mission scientists were watching for.

The Moon is so far from Earth that, using its average distance, you could line up every other planet in the solar system between us and still have about 4,400 kilometres left over.

Antarctica's Blood Falls runs red because iron-rich brine reddens on contact with the air

Off the coast of Japan lie perfectly geometric circles two metres wide pressed into the seabed, and divers who filmed them in 2011 learned they were courtship sculptures built grain by grain over a week by a pufferfish barely the size of a human hand.

In 1999, the Post Office began rolling out Fujitsu's Horizon accounting system across thousands of branches, and within years more than 700 subpostmasters were prosecuted over shortfalls generated by a screen before a High Court judge found the software itself could create phantom losses

A volcano in Ecuador called Chimborazo sits closer to outer space than Mount Everest does, not because it is taller, but because the Earth bulges at the equator and Everest, further from that bulge, is actually deeper inside the planet.
