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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
On 28 September 1969, a fireball broke apart over a small Victorian farming town called Murchison and scattered black, carbon-rich rocks across the paddocks — and those rocks turned out to contain grains of stardust formed 7 billion years ago, older than the Sun, older than Earth, and the oldest solid material any human has ever held
We tend to imagine the Moon as a barren, resourceless rock, but the permanently shadowed craters near its south pole hold something future astronauts may prize more than gold: water ice, confirmed by NASA missions, that could one day be split into oxygen to breathe and hydrogen for rocket fuel.
In one drilled Martian rock, Curiosity found 21 organic molecules — seven never before detected on Mars — including a nitrogen-bearing ring structure that belongs to the same chemical family as precursors to RNA and DNA.
Harry Harlow gave infant rhesus monkeys a choice between a wire mother that could feed them and a soft cloth mother built for warmth and comfort. Again and again, the monkeys clung to the cloth mother, going to the wire one only when they needed milk — a finding that helped overturn the idea that love was just hunger in disguise.
Astronomers thought Solar System comets gave us a fair sample of comet water, but interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS has blown that idea open: its water carries over 30 times more heavy hydrogen than typical comets formed around our Sun, hinting that our own comet family may be the local oddball — not the cosmic rule.
In 1909, the chemist Fritz Haber pulled a few millilitres of ammonia out of ordinary air in a Karlsruhe laboratory, and the reaction he started now supplies the nitrogen atoms in roughly half the protein inside every human body alive today
Astronauts on the Moon, with no atmosphere above them, looked up and saw a white sun — the yellow colour we see from Earth is not the sun's real colour but an artefact our own atmosphere paints onto it by scattering blue wavelengths sideways into the sky
In the summer of 1858, a lesser-known 35-year-old naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace mailed Charles Darwin a 20-page letter from the Indonesian jungle outlining the theory of evolution by natural selection — a theory Darwin had been quietly developing for 20 years without publishing — forcing Darwin to hastily share the credit with a man he had never met
The most powerful telescope ever built by human beings sits permanently parked 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, sheltered from the Sun by a folded shield the size of a tennis court — keeping one side of the spacecraft at minus 233 degrees Celsius while the other side reaches 85 degrees above zero, a temperature difference of more than 300 degrees across a single instrument that nobody can ever fly out to repair
In 1987, Costa Rica's forest cover had collapsed to roughly 21% of the country, and the mechanism that quietly reversed it over the next three decades was not a treaty but a small line item in the national tax on gasoline, paying private landowners to let the trees grow back
