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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Every textbook says Venus is Earth's nearest planetary neighbour, but a simulation run over thousands of years of orbital data found that Mercury holds that title on average — because it never strays as far as Venus does on the far side of its orbit
Off the coast of Brazil sits an island so dangerous that the government has banned nearly everyone from ever setting foot on it: home to as many as four thousand of the most venomous vipers in the world, found nowhere else on Earth
Nearly seven miles beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean lies a place so hostile that only a handful of human beings in all of history have ever seen it — total darkness, near-freezing water, and pressure equivalent to a jet's weight bearing down on a single postage stamp
The Red Cross estimates that roughly three million Vietnamese people have been affected by Agent Orange's dioxin contamination, including more than 150,000 children born with serious birth defects, some in families who had no direct exposure to the chemical themselves
The James Webb Space Telescope just found the same unidentified molecule on both Titan and Pluto — two worlds with almost nothing in common — and scientists say they cannot yet match it to any known substance in any existing database
Around 1,200 people quietly moved back into the Chernobyl exclusion zone after the evacuation and were mostly left alone. Most were elderly, many were women, and only a small remnant remains; the population has dwindled largely because it was old and never renewed
Earth's core holds enough gold to cover every continent in a layer 50 centimetres deep, but until volcanic rocks from Hawaii were analysed in 2025, geologists assumed it was sealed away forever — the core turns out to be leaking
A Y-chromosome analysis of a 4,000-year-old Siberian warrior buried beneath more than 100 bone armor plates has traced his lineage to peoples still living across the Russian Far East today
The Moon does not cross the sky at a steady speed, and the Antikythera mechanism accounted for it with two slightly offset gears joined by a pin running in a slot. It is the oldest surviving geared device known to produce a quasi-sinusoidal variation, centuries before the first surviving sine tables
In April 2029, asteroid Apophis will pass just 32,000 kilometres above Earth—inside the orbit of geostationary satellites—and NASA’s OSIRIS-APEX spacecraft will follow close behind to see what Earth’s gravity did to it
