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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Gaia data revealed 6,594 nearby solar twins, including more than 1,500 born around the same time as the Sun. Researchers propose that many of them—and perhaps our Sun—migrated more than 10,000 light-years from the Milky Way’s turbulent inner disk, potentially placing Earth in the quieter galactic environment where complex life eventually evolved.
In 1905 a Bohemian prince brought five muskrats back from a hunting trip to America and released them on his castle ponds near Prague; their descendants crossed Europe and Asia at a walking pace, and the muskrat is now trapped from the Netherlands to Japan
Par Pond, a 2,300-acre South Carolina reservoir dug to cool two plutonium production reactors, now holds several hundred alligators, and researchers keep catching, testing and releasing them, because an animal that lives 40 to 70 years carries the site's whole contamination record in its blood
For most of human history, anyone standing beneath a clear, moonless sky could see the Milky Way. Electric light began erasing that view little more than a century ago—and today, artificial skyglow hides our galaxy from more than one-third of humanity.
For a few months each spring, underwater microphones off New York fill with the calls of endangered sei whales — then, as the ocean warms, the voices almost disappear, revealing a migration that happens largely beyond human sight
Before weather satellites, forecasts rarely stayed accurate beyond two days, and forecasters worked from hand-plotted maps, cloud sightings and barometric readings, with the Southern Hemisphere getting even less lead time before storms arrived
Thirty-nine Hubble-timed globular clusters in the inner 20,000 light-years of the Milky Way revealed a third age-metallicity sequence — proof a 500-million-solar-mass dwarf named LKH was swallowed 11.8 billion years ago, 1.8 billion years before Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus
A millionth of a second after the Big Bang, matter existed as a near-perfect liquid so hot that protons and neutrons could not yet form—and CERN has now recreated a microscopic droplet of it using oxygen nuclei, the smallest collision system yet to reveal one of its defining signatures.
The grasshopper sparrow has lost 97 percent of its New York population, and its loudest comeback is on the capped 2,200-acre Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, where over 50 pairs nested in one season, because a trash mound sealed under plastic cannot grow trees, so it stays grassland forever
A wind operator with 154 farms in the United States admitted in a Wyoming courtroom to 150 dead bald and golden eagles across 50 of them since 2012, 136 of them struck by a blade, and the plea deal priced every eagle its turbines kill over the next five years at $29,623
