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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Apollo 12 was struck by lightning twice in the first 52 seconds of flight, filling the spacecraft with warning lights and turning Mission Control’s data into nonsense — until a young controller named John Aaron recognised an obscure failure pattern and calmly said: “Try SCE to Aux.”
The notebooks Marie Curie used in her research remain radioactively contaminated more than a hundred years later. Some Curie papers have been found contaminated with radium-226, an isotope with a half-life of about 1,600 years, and original volumes are kept under strict radiation-protection controls before anyone can handle them.
In the weightlessness of orbit, an astronaut’s heart can become more spherical as it no longer works against gravity in the usual way, while their spine stretches enough to make them measurably taller before they return to Earth.
A Greenland shark studied in 2016 was estimated to be nearly 400 years old, meaning it may have been born around the time Shakespeare’s era was ending — and, astonishingly, would not have reached sexual maturity for more than another century.
NASA's Parker Solar Probe flew in and out of the solar corona and found a source of high-energy particles that no existing model had predicted
In September 1969, a 100-kilogram space rock exploded in the sky above Murchison, Australia — and 50 years later, scientists analyzing dust grains buried inside the meteorite found particles between 5 and 7 billion years old, formed in the dying outer layers of stars that lived and died long before our Sun was born, in what remains the oldest solid material ever identified on the surface of the Earth
The tallest volcano in the solar system is so wide that from most places on its slopes, you would never see a dramatic summit rising ahead of you — Olympus Mons is broader than some countries, and its gentle flanks curve away with Mars long before the mountain looks like a mountain at all.
During World War II a US War Production Board memo accused the diamond cartel of intentionally risking Allied war production by refusing to release a stockpile of industrial diamonds America needed to machine its engines
Scientists say the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could collapse with very little additional warming and the four metres of sea level rise that would follow cannot be stopped once it begins
Two continent-sized structures named Tuzo and Jason sit nearly 1,800 miles beneath the surface of the Earth — one beneath the Pacific Ocean and the other beneath Africa — and have been holding their shape for at least 200 million years, in two of the largest single structures ever identified inside any planet, despite no one on the surface ever having seen them
