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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Engineers trying to warn people 10,000 years from now about buried nuclear waste realised that no language could be trusted to last that long. So they imagined warnings that would not depend on words alone: fields of jagged concrete thorns, hostile earthworks and monuments designed to feel dangerous before they were understood. The message they wanted to send was almost anti-monumental: this is not a place of honour, and nothing valued is buried here.
It feels obvious that heavy things fall faster than light ones, but drop a hammer and a feather where there is no air to slow them and they hit the ground at the exact same instant, the same result an astronaut proved by releasing both on the airless surface of the Moon.
Everest is the highest mountain above sea level, but most of Mauna Kea in Hawaii is hidden beneath the Pacific, and measured from its base on the ocean floor to its summit it stands more than a kilometre taller than Everest, making it the tallest mountain on Earth.
The smell that fills the air during the first rainfall after a dry spell is called petrichor, and it comes from plant oils, soil bacteria, and a molecule the human nose can detect at almost unbelievable concentrations
The Pando aspen grove in Utah looks like 47,000 separate trees, but every trunk is a genetically identical clone connected by a single underground root system weighing roughly 6,000 tons, making it possibly the heaviest living organism on Earth and at least 14,000 years old.
The DNA in a single human cell, if stretched into a single thin line, would extend approximately 2 meters — and the total DNA in your entire body, if connected end to end, would stretch from Earth to the Sun and back roughly 245 times, all packed into cells so small that tens of thousands of them would fit on the head of a pin
For nearly two decades, researchers have been demonstrating in mice that the blood of a young animal, when surgically shared with an old one, can reverse signs of aging across nearly every tissue — heart, brain, muscle, liver, kidney — and the search for the specific factors in young blood that cause this effect has now become one of the most heavily funded races in modern biotech
In 2003, an Oxford philosopher named Nick Bostrom published an argument that we are statistically more likely to be inside a computer simulation than in original reality — provided any sufficiently advanced civilization runs simulations of its own ancestors, a conditional that has reshaped serious debate about the nature of existence
Smell has a direct neural pathway to the brain's memory centres — and researchers used that to produce a 226% performance gap on a memory test, without drugs or training
Glass frogs can turn much of their body see-through while they sleep by pulling almost all of their red blood cells out of circulation and storing them in their liver, then releasing them again when they wake and need to move.
