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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
There are roughly 4,400 tiny explosions happening inside your body every second, as atoms of radioactive potassium quietly decay in your muscles and tissues right now — you have been faintly radioactive your entire life, and you will be for all of it
The default mode network burns 20% of the brain's energy doing nothing in particular — and Marcus Raichle only found it in 2001 because PET scanners kept showing the same regions lighting up between tasks
The universe is not only expanding — its expansion is accelerating. After decades of searching, physicists still do not know what is causing it. The name they gave the mystery, dark energy, is less an explanation than a placeholder for one of the biggest gaps in modern cosmology.
We tend to think of Neanderthals as a species that went extinct, but a Princeton geneticist found evidence of three waves of interbreeding over 250,000 years, leading him to argue Neanderthals didn't disappear — they were absorbed into us
Nikola Tesla wrote in 1900 that an automaton might one day appear to think for itself — the surprise is not that he predicted modern AI perfectly, but that he understood how quickly a machine that responds, adapts, and acts could begin to disturb the boundary between mechanism and mind
A Russian cosmonaut named Sergei Krikalev has physically travelled further into the future than almost any other human being in history — across six spaceflights and 803 cumulative days at orbital velocity, Einstein's theory of special relativity has made him approximately 0.02 seconds younger than other people his age
Webb found a planet stretched into a lemon shape around a pulsar, with an atmosphere of carbon that seems to rule out every way we know of forming it
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station can see flashes of light even with their eyes closed — not from light entering the eye, but from high-energy space particles passing through their body and triggering the retina or visual pathway directly.
Tibetan people can live at altitudes above 4,000 metres where many humans struggle with thin air, and one of the genetic tricks that helps them do it did not arise in Tibetans alone: a 2014 Nature study found that a key high-altitude variant near EPAS1 was inherited from Denisovans, an extinct group of archaic humans who interbred with our ancestors.
The spider hides by pretending to be the fungus that kills its neighbors, and it took scientists this long to notice because science had no category for an animal that imitates a disease
