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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 Jupiter-mass world about 2,050 light-years away is being pulled into a lemon shape by the pulsar it circles every 7.8 hours. Webb found its atmosphere dominated by helium and free carbon—with no detectable water, methane or carbon dioxide—while models predict soot clouds and diamonds deep inside. Neither ordinary planet formation nor the remains of a stripped star can satisfactorily explain how it formed.
A wood frog in North America can freeze through winter — its heart stops, it does not breathe and as much as 65% of its body water turns to ice — then thaw in spring and hop away, a feat scientists are studying for clues to preserving human organs
Cameras on whale shark fins caught them feeding as deep as 68.8 metres
Hours after a Soviet nuclear satellite broke up over Canada in 1978, Moscow's ambassador said the reactor on board had been designed for complete destruction on re-entry — radioactivity had already fallen across 124,000 square kilometres of the country's north, searchers located fragments the formal claim recorded as showing "lethal radioactivity," and Ottawa billed the Soviet Union exactly C$6,041,174.70
Voyager 1 records plasma waves between the stars at frequencies within human hearing, allowing the electrical data to be amplified and played through an ordinary loudspeaker
In 2012, a US spy agency handed NASA two unused Hubble-sized telescope systems that had been sitting in storage in upstate New York — one of their mirrors now forms the heart of Roman, an observatory launching with Hubble-like sharpness across a field at least 100 times larger.
Before he was old enough to drive, a 14-year-old talked a university physics department into lending him a sub-basement — the machine he assembled there fused atoms in a plasma hotter than the sun's core and made him the youngest person ever to achieve nuclear fusion
A Galápagos tortoise species was down to 14 known survivors when a worldwide search turned up one more male living at the San Diego Zoo, and after he was shipped to the Galápagos in 1977 to breed, the rangers who carried "Diego" back to his island in 2020 left him among roughly 2,300 wild tortoises
Since 2021, Guam power crews have collected electrocuted brown tree snakes for USGS biologists after outages, the invader's long body bridging two live wires at once and turning a climbing animal into the missing piece of an electrical circuit
On August 2, 1994, a squirrel chewed through a power line in Trumbull, Connecticut, and froze the Nasdaq for 34 minutes, the second blackout a squirrel had handed the exchange in seven years, because every trade in America's electronic market ran through one building on one suburban feeder
