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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
The eastern brown snake, responsible for the majority of Australia's snakebite deaths, is so well adapted to suburban Brisbane and Sydney backyards that catchers remove thousands each summer from garages, swimming pool filters, and kitchen pantries chasing the introduced black rats that thrive in human kitchens.
In 1968, the engineers building the Apollo Guidance Computer wove its software into physical memory by threading copper wire through tiny magnetic cores by hand, and the women who did the stitching were called 'Little Old Ladies' on the factory floor even though they were holding the only program that could land a man on the Moon.
The fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis infects carpenter ants in tropical forests, hijacks their nervous system to compel them to climb to a precise height and humidity, locks their mandibles onto a leaf vein, then sprouts a stalk from the ant's head to rain spores onto colony-mates passing below.
Periodical cicadas in the eastern United States emerge from the ground every 13 or 17 years — both prime numbers, not by coincidence — because their long, indivisible cycles make it nearly impossible for any predator with a shorter life cycle to evolve to feed on them, in one of the most mathematically elegant defenses in the natural world
Engineers trying to warn people 10,000 years from now about buried nuclear waste realised that no language could be trusted to last that long. So they imagined warnings that would not depend on words alone: fields of jagged concrete thorns, hostile earthworks and monuments designed to feel dangerous before they were understood. The message they wanted to send was almost anti-monumental: this is not a place of honour, and nothing valued is buried here.
It feels obvious that heavy things fall faster than light ones, but drop a hammer and a feather where there is no air to slow them and they hit the ground at the exact same instant, the same result an astronaut proved by releasing both on the airless surface of the Moon.
Everest is the highest mountain above sea level, but most of Mauna Kea in Hawaii is hidden beneath the Pacific, and measured from its base on the ocean floor to its summit it stands more than a kilometre taller than Everest, making it the tallest mountain on Earth.
The smell that fills the air during the first rainfall after a dry spell is called petrichor, and it comes from plant oils, soil bacteria, and a molecule the human nose can detect at almost unbelievable concentrations
The Pando aspen grove in Utah looks like 47,000 separate trees, but every trunk is a genetically identical clone connected by a single underground root system weighing roughly 6,000 tons, making it possibly the heaviest living organism on Earth and at least 14,000 years old.
The DNA in a single human cell, if stretched into a single thin line, would extend approximately 2 meters — and the total DNA in your entire body, if connected end to end, would stretch from Earth to the Sun and back roughly 245 times, all packed into cells so small that tens of thousands of them would fit on the head of a pin
