What's up in
Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
A cheetah can go from a standstill to about 60 miles an hour in roughly three seconds, out-accelerating many sports cars, but it can't hold that speed for long
A tongue-eating louse called Cymothoa exigua swims into a fish's gills, latches onto its tongue, drinks the blood until the tongue withers and falls off, and then spends the rest of its life acting as a functional replacement tongue the fish uses normally to eat.
Neuroscientists found a region of the brain specialized for recognising faces that activates in as little as 50 milliseconds and it develops even in people who have been blind since birth
One of the earliest great extinctions in Earth's history may have been caused not by an asteroid or a volcano but by oxygen itself, when tiny photosynthetic microbes slowly filled the air with a gas that was poison to much of the anaerobic life that ruled the planet long before us
The Pacific Ocean is so large that all the world’s land could fit inside it, and there would still be room left over, which is why calling Earth a “blue planet” is almost an understatement
Earth has gone through five mass extinction events in its history, each wiping out the majority of life on the planet — and many biologists argue we are currently in the early stages of the sixth, caused not by an asteroid or a volcanic eruption but by a single species changing the planet's atmosphere, oceans, and ecosystems faster than other species can adapt
The asteroid that ended the dinosaurs did not just leave a crater, it turned the sky into a weapon, and the worst damage may have come after the impact itself was already over
The Amazon’s ancient drainage system once ran the other way, carrying water and sediment westward across South America before the rise of the Andes, shifting land levels, and massive sediment buildup helped turn it into the east-flowing river we know today.
The light from the Andromeda Galaxy — the most distant object visible to the naked human eye — left its source about 2.5 million years ago, which means when you look at it on a clear night, you are seeing light that began its journey to Earth around the time the first members of our genus, Homo, were learning to use stone tools
Laughter activates many of the same brain reward circuits as food and sex, and a 2025 study finds it measurably lowers cortisol and may restructure how the developing brain builds resilience to stress
