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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 eastern brown snake, responsible for the majority of Australia's snakebite deaths, is so well adapted to suburban Brisbane and Sydney backyards that catchers remove thousands each summer from garages, swimming pool filters, and kitchen pantries chasing the introduced black rats that thrive in human kitchens.
In January 2005, the Huygens probe parachuted for 147 minutes through Titan’s orange haze, landed on a cold plain scattered with ice pebbles, and kept transmitting from the surface of Saturn’s largest moon for 72 minutes before Cassini carried its signal out of view
In 1968, the engineers building the Apollo Guidance Computer wove its software into physical memory by threading copper wire through tiny magnetic cores by hand, and the women who did the stitching were called 'Little Old Ladies' on the factory floor even though they were holding the only program that could land a man on the Moon.
The fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis infects carpenter ants in tropical forests, hijacks their nervous system to compel them to climb to a precise height and humidity, locks their mandibles onto a leaf vein, then sprouts a stalk from the ant's head to rain spores onto colony-mates passing below.
Periodical cicadas in the eastern United States emerge from the ground every 13 or 17 years — both prime numbers, not by coincidence — because their long, indivisible cycles make it nearly impossible for any predator with a shorter life cycle to evolve to feed on them, in one of the most mathematically elegant defenses in the natural world
Engineers trying to warn people 10,000 years from now about buried nuclear waste realised that no language could be trusted to last that long. So they imagined warnings that would not depend on words alone: fields of jagged concrete thorns, hostile earthworks and monuments designed to feel dangerous before they were understood. The message they wanted to send was almost anti-monumental: this is not a place of honour, and nothing valued is buried here.
It feels obvious that heavy things fall faster than light ones, but drop a hammer and a feather where there is no air to slow them and they hit the ground at the exact same instant, the same result an astronaut proved by releasing both on the airless surface of the Moon.
Everest is the highest mountain above sea level, but most of Mauna Kea in Hawaii is hidden beneath the Pacific, and measured from its base on the ocean floor to its summit it stands more than a kilometre taller than Everest, making it the tallest mountain on Earth.
The town of Mawsynram in northeastern India receives roughly 11,872 millimetres of rain a year, so much that residents weave body-length shields called knups from bamboo and banana leaf to walk hands-free through downpours that can last weeks without pause.
The smell that fills the air during the first rainfall after a dry spell is called petrichor, and it comes from plant oils, soil bacteria, and a molecule the human nose can detect at almost unbelievable concentrations
