What's up in
Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Everything we know about the Earth's core comes from earthquakes: seismic waves slow, bend, and vanish as they cross the boundaries below us, and in 1936 a Danish scientist named Inge Lehmann read those shadows to reveal a hidden inner core nested at the planet's center
In 2023, seismologists at the Australian National University, reading the echoes of earthquakes ringing back and forth through the whole planet, confirmed Earth hides an innermost core inside its inner core, a distinct iron ball roughly 1,300 kilometres across whose crystals line up along a different axis than the shell around it
In 1994, a park ranger abseiling into a canyon 150 kilometres northwest of Sydney found a stand of trees with knobbly bark that matched 90-million-year-old fossils, and the Wollemi pine's exact location is still classified
We tend to think Voyager 1 has already left the solar system, but it has only crossed beyond the Sun’s protective plasma bubble — NASA says it will take another 300 years to reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud, and perhaps 30,000 years to pass beyond the solar system’s outermost frontier
A T. rex unearthed in South Dakota could sell for up to $30 million at auction — and scientists fear that if a private collector buys it, one of Earth’s rarest records may disappear from research
Vitamin B12 is synthesised only by bacteria and archaea — and the human liver stores roughly a three-year supply before deficiency shows in the blood
The average human ingests roughly a credit card's worth of plastic every week — and the particles small enough to cross the blood-brain barrier measure under 300 nanometers
Antarctica is classified as a desert because it receives less precipitation than the Sahara, yet it holds about 70 per cent of the planet's fresh water, locked in an ice sheet averaging over two kilometres thick across the continent
Einstein’s relativity allows time travel into the future, and we have already measured it: atomic clocks flown around Earth on aeroplanes came home showing a different time from clocks left on the ground
A Mexican salamander that can regrow entire limbs does something stranger than healing — the axolotl reopens parts of its embryonic blueprint and uses it to rebuild what was lost
