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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 star was torn apart about 30,000 light-years out from its galaxy's core, and astronomers cannot yet say whether the black hole that did it was flung there or is the last dense trace of a swallowed dwarf galaxy
A tiny freshwater hydra shows no measurable signs of aging, and when Daniel Martinez tracked three cohorts of them at Pomona College for four years the death rate never rose once — over that same stretch each animal had quietly replaced its entire body, cell by cell, at least 60 times
3I/ATLAS, only the third comet confirmed to come from beyond our solar system, carries water with a heavy-hydrogen ratio 40 times higher than Earth's oceans, evidence it formed somewhere far colder than our own star system ever was
A microbe scooped from a Yellowstone hot spring in the 1960s quietly changed the world — the heat-proof enzyme inside it made modern DNA testing possible, which means most DNA evidence in criminal cases and nearly every genetic test in use today traces back to a bug that lives in near-boiling water
There's a river in Spain that runs deep red and is as acidic as vinegar — so hostile that most ordinary life can't survive it, yet it teems with unique iron- and sulfur-oxidizing microbes that give it that color, and it so resembles Mars that NASA uses it to rehearse the search for life on other worlds
Venus is almost exactly Earth's size and formed right beside us, yet its surface melts lead under an atmosphere ninety times heavier than ours, a runaway greenhouse that turned our nearest twin into the most hostile world in the solar system
A single Nile crocodile bite closes with roughly 3,700 pounds of force per square inch, more than any measured living animal, yet the muscles that open the same jaw are so weak an adult can hold them shut with two hands
We have sharper maps of Mars than of most of Earth's deep ocean floor, and the little of it we have reached rewrote biology: in 1977 a submersible found thriving life around hot vents in total darkness, fed by chemistry rather than sunlight
Travelling at the speed of light is not just hard but impossible for anything that has mass, since it would take infinite energy, so the real question is how close we could get and whether the loopholes physicists talk about are more than mathematics
A 2021 estimate suggested that about 2.5 billion Tyrannosaurus rex lived, while only 32 relatively well-preserved post-juvenile specimens were then held in public museums — roughly one for every 80 million animals. And T. rex is one of the better represented large theropods
