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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Beneath Oregon’s Blue Mountains, a single honey fungus has been spreading through the roots of the forest for thousands of years, now covering nearly 10 square kilometres. Mostly hidden underground and betrayed at the surface by dying trees and seasonal mushrooms, it is one of the strongest contenders for the largest living organism on Earth.
Nearly three kilometres beneath a Canadian mine, geologists found water that may have been isolated in the rock for roughly two billion years — older than animals, plants and almost everything we think of as complex life. The brine was so salty and bitter that, when one researcher tasted it, she was sampling a flavour shaped by a world humans never knew
Saturn is the only planet in the solar system that is, on average, less dense than water, so in a big enough bathtub it would float
A small wave breaking on a beach contains more living organisms than the total number of humans who have ever existed on Earth — roughly 10 million bacteria, viruses, and tiny plankton in every milliliter of seawater — meaning every wave that touches the shore carries a population of life that vastly outnumbers every person who has ever lived in the entire history of our species
A single day on Mercury, from one sunrise to the next, lasts 176 Earth days, which is two full Mercury years
Two billion years ago, a uranium deposit in Gabon switched itself on as a natural nuclear reactor, running in pulses for hundreds of thousands of years as groundwater boiled away and seeped back to throttle the chain reaction
In 1994, a park ranger rappelling into a sandstone canyon 150 kilometres from Sydney found a living stand of trees known until then only from 90-million-year-old fossils and presumed long extinct, and fewer than 100 wild Wollemi pines still exist in a grove whose coordinates the Australian government keeps classified.
Breathable oxygen has now been produced on the surface of Mars — generated between 2021 and 2023 by a NASA experiment about the size of a toaster, riding inside the Perseverance rover — in the first time humans have ever made air on another planet, opening the door to bringing astronauts safely home one day
Urban birds in a new study let men get about a metre closer than women before flying away, and the mystery is not the distance itself but what the birds are seeing in people that people do not see in themselves
Russian scientists in Siberia have brought a 24,000-year-old microscopic animal back to life — a tiny creature called a bdelloid rotifer, frozen in Arctic permafrost since the last Ice Age — and after thawing, it began moving, eating, and reproducing as if no time had passed, in research suggesting that some forms of life can survive in a kind of suspended animation for tens of thousands of years
