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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
A declassified 1959 US Army feasibility study proposed a twelve-man Moon outpost by November 1966, found the two American missile ranges it surveyed unsuitable for the job, and assumed its Saturn rockets would lift off from an eight-pad equatorial launch site in Brazil
In 1925, 24-year-old Radcliffe graduate student Cecilia Payne calculated that stars consist overwhelmingly of hydrogen and helium. Princeton astronomer Henry Norris Russell called the result “clearly impossible,” prompting her to declare in her thesis that her own extraordinary finding was “almost certainly not real.” Four years later, Russell confirmed that she had been right.
Why does a funnel-web spider new to science turn up at just three sites in northern Idaho, about 500 kilometres east of the western Cascades and coast ranges where its genus was known to live?
Nearly 300 metres beneath Mexico’s Chihuahuan Desert, miners tunnelling for ore broke into a chamber filled with crystals as long as a bus — giant beams of gypsum up to 11 metres long, hidden underwater for hundreds of thousands of years until mine pumps exposed them
Jane Goodall arrived at Gombe in 1960 at age 26 with a notebook and a pair of binoculars, and the watch she started has now followed the same chimpanzee families continuously for 66 years, long enough to record tool use, warfare, and adoption inside one community
Nearly a mile beneath South Dakota, the 10-tonne LUX-ZEPLIN detector recorded a single high-energy xenon recoil for which researchers found no likely background explanation—the experiment’s most intriguing dark-matter candidate yet, although its 2.6-sigma significance remains far short of a discovery.
A newly found star circles the Milky Way's central black hole every 8.7 years and passes it at about 25,000 kilometres a second, more than 8 percent of the speed of light, and the pass is so close that its discoverers say there is a fair chance of measuring the hole's spin within a decade
A black monkey with a pinkish-orange patch around its mouth was photographed in a Congo forest canopy in 2008, detected 114 times between 2018 and 2022, and only then named Colobus congoensis — by its describers' count, the fifth African monkey species new to science in 75 years
In 2025, astronomers mapped Quipu, the largest reliably identified cosmic superstructure yet—a branching filament roughly 1.4 billion light-years long, 13,000 times the diameter of the Milky Way’s stellar disc, with an estimated mass of about 200 quadrillion Suns.
Joro spiders' common prey families came out 10 to 25 percent apart from the native orb weavers' in a gut-content DNA study of 356 spiders at 52 sites in Georgia and South Carolina — and where the Joros were present, the natives' guts were not distinguishable from sites without them
