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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
On a February morning in 2013, a rock from space the size of a house exploded over a Russian city with the force of thirty Hiroshima bombs — and no one saw it coming, because it had come at us straight out of the glare of the sun, invisible to every telescope on Earth
Off the coast of South Africa, orcas have learned to kill great white sharks with surgical precision — seizing a pectoral fin, eviscerating the shark in under two minutes, and taking one organ above all: the enormous, oil-rich liver, leaving most of the carcass behind
Phobos circles Mars so quickly that it completes more than three orbits per Martian day. Because it outruns the planet’s rotation, it rises in the west and sets in the east—the only known moon whose orbit is shorter than its planet’s day
NASA's Mars helicopter was built to prove that flight was possible in an atmosphere one percent as thick as Earth's, and it was expected to manage five flights over thirty days, but it flew 72 times across almost three years before a hard landing shattered its rotor blades, and it now sits where it landed, still recording the weather.
Perseverance's Mars sample tubes were built to be among the cleanest objects humans have made, because their job is to preserve ancient Martian chemistry — and one untreated fingerprint would have exceeded the entire organic contamination allowance by roughly 300 times.
Every spacecraft ever sent to operate beyond Jupiter has depended on plutonium-238—a reactor-made isotope that cannot be mined. The United States stopped producing it in 1988, then spent nearly three decades drawing down old reserves and supplementing them with material purchased from Russia. In 2015, American production finally restarted with a batch of just 50 grams.
In 2000, miners in Mexico broke through a wall and found a hidden cave of crystals taller than telephone poles — beautiful enough to seem invented, and so hostile that scientists worked inside in ice-packed cooling suits, typically for no more than half an hour, before the heat and humidity began shutting down the body's only way of shedding heat
On a glacier in Antarctica there is a waterfall that appears to bleed — a slow ooze of deep red spreading across the white — and the truth beneath it is stranger than the sight: a reservoir of ancient brine, sealed under the ice for an age still argued over, staining red the instant its iron meets the air
Most dinosaur fossils show bone. This one, a juvenile plant-eater from northeastern China, preserved individual skin cells inside hollow, porcupine-like spikes — a skin structure that existed for 125 million years without anyone knowing it was possible
Parts of the northern United States see only a shallow bite taken out of the Sun on August 12, from 3 percent in Detroit to 37 percent in Fairbanks — and the same alignment leaves the sky moonless for that night's Perseid peak
