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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 Mediterranean dried out almost completely about 5.6 million years ago and sat as a salt desert for hundreds of thousands of years, until the Atlantic broke back through at Gibraltar and refilled the entire basin in a flood that may have taken as little as two years
Cassini was deliberately flown into Saturn in September 2017 while still working perfectly, because the alternative was letting a dying spacecraft carrying Earth bacteria eventually drift into Enceladus, a moon with a liquid ocean and hydrothermal vents on its floor.
Every atom of oxygen in the air traces back to a catastrophe: cyanobacteria started releasing it about 2.4 billion years ago, poisoned most of the life that existed at the time, and stripped enough methane from the atmosphere to freeze the planet nearly to the equator.
Many scientists have won a Nobel Prize, but only one person ever pulled off what Marie Curie did: she won Nobels in two different sciences, physics in 1903 and chemistry in 1911, a feat no one has repeated in the century since
The Sahara sends roughly 27 million tonnes of dust across the Atlantic every year, and the phosphorus in it is what stops the Amazon's soils exhausting themselves, which means the largest rainforest on earth is quietly fertilised by the largest hot desert on earth.
At the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, a thousand metres down, lies a lake so lethal its discoverers named it the Jacuzzi of Despair — a pool of brine so dense it will not mix with the sea around it, its floor lined with the pickled remains of nearly everything that swims into it.
There's a stretch of desert in Chile so dry that a single rain event turned up in four years of instrument records, and its soil fools life-detection hardware in precisely the way Mars does, so NASA spent four field seasons rehearsing a rover mission on it
In the jungles of Vietnam there is a cave so vast it has its own river, its own weather, and its own rainforest growing beneath shafts of daylight — large enough to swallow a New York City block of skyscrapers, and no outsider set foot inside it until 2009
The ocean produces roughly half of the oxygen humans breathe — not the Amazon, not forests — through microscopic organisms called phytoplankton that most people have never heard of
How does a fish live eight kilometres beneath the surface, under pressure equal to a thousand cars stacked on its back, in water so cold and so heavy that the proteins in its body should long since have stopped folding?
