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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Most people alive today will live to see the Arctic Ocean lose its summer ice — for the first time since before our species left Africa, 115,000 years ago
By 2025, a 4,800-year-old bristlecone pine named Methuselah in California's White Mountains remained the oldest known non-clonal living tree, and the exact location of the gnarled, wind-stunted survivor is kept secret by the US Forest Service to protect it from vandals and souvenir hunters.
A self-taught Russian amateur astronomer named Filipp Romanov has been finding asteroids that NASA-funded sky-surveys missed — including a near-Earth asteroid he spotted in February 2026 before any of the professional systems noticed it — working from a village on Russia's Sea of Japan coast, and naming each new asteroid he finds after one of his great-grandparents
Beneath the streets of Naples lies a 2,400-year-old network of Greek and Roman tunnels and cisterns carved into soft volcanic tuff, and during World War II tens of thousands of residents sheltered in the same hollow chambers their ancestors had dug to quarry building stone.
New HIV infections fell by 40 percent between 2010 and 2024 and the number of people requiring treatment for neglected tropical diseases dropped by 36 percent in the same period, according to the World Health Statistics 2026 report — gains now at risk as the funding that built them comes under pressure
The blue color of the sky is not a property of the air itself — air is colorless, and a glass of it would look exactly like a glass of nothing — and the blue you see overhead is sunlight being scattered by molecules of nitrogen and oxygen, which deflect short blue wavelengths much more strongly than long red ones, in the same physics that makes the Sun appear yellow and a sunset appear red
In December 1938 a museum curator sifting through a fisherman's catch in a South African port lifted out a heavy blue fish that science had known only from fossils and presumed extinct since the age of the dinosaurs
In 1971, a team of Soviet geologists in Turkmenistan's Karakum Desert set a collapsed gas crater alight and assumed the flames would burn out within weeks, but more than five decades later the pit travelers now call the Door to Hell is still throwing orange light across the dunes every night
The deepest point in the ocean, Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, sits nearly 11 kilometres below the surface — a depth so extreme that if Everest were dropped into it, the peak would still be covered by more than two kilometres of water
In 1835 the New York Sun told readers the Moon was full of life, from winged man-bats to bison — and pinned the discovery on a real astronomer who never said any of it
