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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
A giant barrel sponge growing on a Caribbean reef off the island of Curaçao was estimated to be roughly 2,300 years old when it was photographed by researchers — meaning it began growing at the bottom of the ocean during the lifetime of Hannibal and survived as a single continuous living organism, filtering seawater on that exact spot, from before the founding of the Roman Empire until it died of disease in 2012
The Greenland shark lives roughly 400 years — longer than any other vertebrate on Earth — and when scientists sequenced its genome in September 2024, they found the species' extraordinary lifespan appears to rely on enormous quantities of duplicated DNA-repair genes, in a biological strategy still keeping individual sharks alive that were born during Shakespeare's lifetime.
The smell of the ocean — that sharp, clean scent people travel thousands of kilometres to breathe — is not salt, which has no real smell, but partly dimethyl sulphide: a sulfur gas released when compounds made by microscopic marine algae are broken down by bacteria, death, and grazing in the sea.
A blind cave salamander called the olm is projected to live past a hundred years, and biologists still cannot explain how it ages so slowly
For decades the heavy rocks that carve trails across a Death Valley lakebed were never seen moving, until cameras caught them gliding on thin rafts of melting ice pushed by a light wind
In 1986, John Gottman and Robert Levenson built an apartment-style lab at the University of Washington, wired hundreds of couples to heart-rate monitors during arguments, and found that the moment a partner's pulse crossed 100 beats per minute the conversation effectively ended — and 85 percent of the people who went silent were men
For a decade the Pink Planet was too faint for any ground telescope to study — and when James Webb finally caught its spectrum, the best fit to the light was an atmosphere hazed with salt clouds
In 1971, Apollo 14 astronaut Stuart Roosa carried hundreds of tree seeds around the Moon in a metal canister inside his personal kit. When the seeds returned to Earth, many were germinated by the U.S. Forest Service and planted as “Moon Trees” — ordinary-looking trees that, decades later, showed no discernible difference from trees whose seeds had never left Earth.
The June Bootids have flared to dozens of meteors an hour in rare years like 1998, but most years the shower is so weak it shows almost nothing — and no outburst is forecast for 2026
No spacecraft has ever landed in the outer solar system — except one: the Huygens probe, which parachuted through Titan's orange haze in 2005 and touched down more than a billion kilometres from Earth in cold that dropped below minus 170 degrees Celsius
