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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
When the Soviet Union sent the dog Laika into orbit in 1957, the public was told she had survived for days — but decades later it emerged that she had actually died within hours, after Sputnik 2’s cabin overheated.
On 22 October 2017, a single lightning flash crossed five US states in 7.39 seconds, travelled 829 kilometres from Texas to near Kansas City, and produced more than 116 cloud-to-ground strikes along its path, an event approximately fifty times longer than a typical lightning bolt that was missed at the time and only identified through a 2024 reanalysis of archived satellite data.
Deep beneath Antarctica, researchers drill ice cores filled with tiny bubbles of ancient air, sealed into the ice for hundreds of thousands of years — letting them sample the atmosphere of a world no living human ever breathed.
In 1986, a freshwater lake in Cameroon released a cloud of carbon dioxide that killed 1,746 people in a single night, and that lake is one of only three on Earth known to be capable of this, the largest of which sits beneath roughly two million people."
Astronauts come home from long stays on the International Space Station measurably taller, their spines stretching by a few centimetres without gravity to compress them — though the extra height usually disappears soon after they return to Earth.
A common dietary supplement — omega-3, the kind found in fish oil and flax — has been shown across nearly 4,000 people to reduce aggression by up to 28%, whether it's the heat-of-the-moment kind or the kind people plan in advance
In 1991, eight people sealed themselves inside a glass world in the Arizona desert for two years, and the experiment nearly unravelled when the oxygen began disappearing from the air they were breathing
The tallest known living thing on Earth is a coastal redwood named Hyperion that stands 380 feet tall in a hidden grove in California, and its exact location is kept secret by the National Park Service because the last time tourists found a record-holding redwood they trampled its root system so badly the tree began dying.
Every GPS satellite is launched with a clock deliberately set to run slow, because Einstein's relativity speeds it up by about 38 microseconds a day once in orbit — and without that built-in correction, your phone's location would drift by roughly ten kilometres a day.
French scientist Michel Siffre spent two months alone in a cave with no clock, no calendar, and no sunlight — and when his team finally told him the experiment was over, he thought he still had nearly a month left underground
