What's up in
Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
The Hubble Space Telescope reached orbit with a mirror ground to the wrong shape by a fraction of a human hair, and astronauts repaired the billion-dollar mistake by effectively giving it glasses
In 2023, researchers placed a GPS collar on a young bull elephant in Zambia. Two years later, his path stretched across four countries and six national parks, revealing the ancient routes elephants still remember, and the human borders now cutting through them
In November 1957, a stray dog from Moscow's streets was strapped into Sputnik 2 and launched into orbit in a capsule never designed to come home — and Soviet officials claimed for 45 years that Laika had died painlessly after several days, until a scientist admitted in 2002 she had died within hours when the thermal control failed.
In 2019, Victor Vescovo made the deepest solo dive in human history, descending nearly 11 kilometres into the Challenger Deep, and at the bottom of the ocean he reported seeing what looked like a plastic bag
Your blood is never blue, not even in the veins under your skin. Starved of oxygen it turns a dark burgundy red — never blue — and the bluish tint you notice is just a trick of light, not the blood's colour
Line up Jupiter, Venus and every other planet in perfect alignment and their combined tug on Earth's ocean is smaller than the effect of a passing weather front — Jupiter alone manages two-thousandths of one per cent of the moon's pull
Scientists searching for alien life are looking ever further out, to Europa, a moon of Jupiter hiding an ocean beneath its ice that could resemble the dark seas where life survives on Earth
The tide rises twice a day because the ocean bulges on both sides of Earth at once — the near side pulled toward the moon, the far side, strangely, left behind as the planet is tugged out from under it
The Earth's inner core grows by roughly a millimetre a year as molten iron freezes onto it, and that slow crystallisation releases the energy that stirs the outer core and keeps the planet's magnetic field alive
Gold, platinum and most of Earth's heavy metals sank into the core as the young planet melted, and the gold we mine today likely arrived later in a rain of asteroids that struck after the core had already formed
