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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
How does an animal weighing less than a chocolate bar fly 13,000 kilometres across the Pacific without landing, eating or sleeping?
Scientists expected the sun to enter a period of historic quiet after 2008, when solar activity hit its weakest level on record — instead it reversed course entirely and has been growing more active ever since, in a trend NASA published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters in September 2025
When Mariner 4 sent back the first close-up of Mars in 1965, the printer was too slow for the engineers waiting on it, so they pinned the raw numbers to a wall and coloured them in with pastels bought from an art shop down the road
Two and a half kilometres beneath the Antarctic ice, a cubic kilometre of frozen water has been wired with 5,160 light sensors, turning the South Pole itself into a telescope that looks down through the entire planet to catch particles arriving from the other side of the sky
The second closest potentially habitable planet to Earth is not around a famous star; it is GJ 887 d, confirmed in 2026 around a quiet red dwarf 10.7 light-years away - making GJ 887 d the second-closest known habitable-zone planet after Proxima Centauri b
A star near the centre of our galaxy reaches almost 3 per cent of the speed of light as it is whipped around something four million times the mass of the Sun that emits no light of its own — and tracking its orbit for nearly three decades helped two astronomers win a Nobel Prize
How does the closest planet to the Sun, with a surface that hits 430 degrees at noon, hold on to billions of tonnes of ice that never melt?
How does a pond in Antarctica sitting at minus 50 degrees refuse to freeze, year after year, while everything around it is solid ice?
A deep-water shark's liver can account for up to 30 per cent of its total body mass, and the oil inside it is what corrects for having no swim bladder: the liver is, functionally, the shark's buoyancy organ
A lion's tongue is covered in hollow, backward-pointing spines called papillae, widely credited with stripping flesh from bone and lifting hair from a hide: the same structure that makes a lick from a domestic cat feel like sandpaper
