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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
The trails of ants marching along your skirting board are drawn in scent, not sight — each ant lays a chemical line the next follows, and the path only fades when the food runs out and no one refreshes it
A single teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh about four billion tonnes on Earth — roughly the mass of a mountain — because the star has crushed the equivalent of the Sun into a sphere the width of a city
Leafcutter ants don't eat the leaves they carry home in long green columns — they feed the clippings to an underground fungus, and it is the fungus they farm and eat, a practice that predates human agriculture by around 50 million years
An octopus has three hearts, blue blood and around 500 million neurons, two thirds of them not in its head but spread through its arms, so each arm can taste, decide and act almost on its own.
The pale, eyeless olm salamander of Slovenian caves can go up to a decade without eating and lives more than 100 years, spending nearly its entire existence motionless in cold darkness it has never once seen.
If you compressed the entire history of Earth into a single calendar year, humans appear at 11:36 pm on the 31st of December, agriculture at 11:59, and everything written down in history occupies the final 15 seconds before midnight
NASA's Psyche spacecraft, on its way to a metal-rich asteroid, used Mars as a gravitational slingshot in May 2026, skimming just 2,800 miles above the planet to gain the speed it needed — Mars as a stepping stone rather than a destination
A single rare meteorite has revealed the chemical fingerprint of a Moon-sized world that once orbited the young Sun before being destroyed in a catastrophic collision — a lost planet science never knew existed until it landed as a rock
A 2026 study found that Jupiter's ocean moon Europa may have a geologically quiet seafloor with little active faulting — meaning the vast hidden ocean long treated as our best bet for alien life may lack the very energy that life would need to survive
Two humpback whales were tracked crossing more than 14,000 kilometres between breeding grounds in Australia and Brazil — one of them shattering every migration record ever recorded for the species
