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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Darwin's bark spider spins the toughest biological material yet measured, a silk more than ten times tougher than Kevlar, and strings its web across rivers on bridge lines up to 25 meters long
At its birth, Earth had no Moon. Then something perhaps the size of Mars slammed into the young planet, flinging molten debris into orbit that became the companion world now pulling our tides, steadying our seasons, and perhaps helping make Earth stable enough for life to flourish.
Between 2006 and 2014, a NASA balloon experiment floating above Antarctica picked up two bizarre radio signals coming up from beneath the ice at angles that should have been impossible — and more than a decade later, no physicist has been able to explain what the signals actually were, with some researchers suggesting they may have been caused by a particle currently unknown to science
The ocean produces roughly half of Earth’s oxygen — not the rainforest, which uses up most of what it makes — through photosynthesis by phytoplankton, microscopic marine organisms so abundant that a single teaspoon of seawater can contain as many as a million of them.
A giant barrel sponge growing on a Caribbean reef off the island of Curaçao was estimated to be roughly 2,300 years old when it was photographed by researchers — meaning it began growing at the bottom of the ocean during the lifetime of Hannibal and survived as a single continuous living organism, filtering seawater on that exact spot, from before the founding of the Roman Empire until it died of disease in 2012
The Greenland shark lives roughly 400 years — longer than any other vertebrate on Earth — and when scientists sequenced its genome in September 2024, they found the species' extraordinary lifespan appears to rely on enormous quantities of duplicated DNA-repair genes, in a biological strategy still keeping individual sharks alive that were born during Shakespeare's lifetime.
The smell of the ocean — that sharp, clean scent people travel thousands of kilometres to breathe — is not salt, which has no real smell, but partly dimethyl sulphide: a sulfur gas released when compounds made by microscopic marine algae are broken down by bacteria, death, and grazing in the sea.
A blind cave salamander called the olm is projected to live past a hundred years, and biologists still cannot explain how it ages so slowly
For decades the heavy rocks that carve trails across a Death Valley lakebed were never seen moving, until cameras caught them gliding on thin rafts of melting ice pushed by a light wind
In 1986, John Gottman and Robert Levenson built an apartment-style lab at the University of Washington, wired hundreds of couples to heart-rate monitors during arguments, and found that the moment a partner's pulse crossed 100 beats per minute the conversation effectively ended — and 85 percent of the people who went silent were men
