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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Proxima Centauri b is our closest known habitable-zone exoplanet, just over four light-years away, and it may be warm enough for liquid water if it has kept an atmosphere. But that “if” is enormous: its red-dwarf star blasts it with extreme radiation strong enough, in some models, to strip an Earth-like atmosphere away.
In a 3.5-billion-year-old clay-rich rock from Gale Crater, NASA’s Curiosity rover identified 21 carbon-based molecules — including a nitrogen-bearing ring structure linked to the chemistry that can precede RNA and DNA — showing that ancient Martian sediments can preserve surprisingly complex organic chemistry for billions of years.
Within hours of reaching microgravity, astronauts’ body fluids shift toward the head, dulling smell and taste — one reason NASA monitors daily nutrition so closely as crews fight the muscle loss space exercise alone cannot fully prevent
For centuries, Korean women used rice water as a beauty ritual — modern cosmetic research now suggests fermented rice extracts can deliver antioxidants, B vitamins, and compounds that help fade hyperpigmentation
Every drawing of a yellow Sun is technically wrong — seen from space, where no atmosphere filters its light, the Sun is white, a full-spectrum star burning at around 5,778 kelvin; the yellow is an artefact that exists only inside Earth's atmosphere, not in the Sun itself
For billions of years, Earth’s magnetic field may have been doing something unexpected: helping guide particles stripped from our upper atmosphere across the 385,000 kilometres to the Moon, where they became trapped in lunar soil — a 2025 finding that adds a surprising new argument for studying the regolith beneath a future Moon base.
Voyager 1 will reach a new milestone in November 2026: it will be so far from Earth that a radio signal travelling at the speed of light will take a full 24 hours to reach it — a distance humanity’s most distant spacecraft crossed in just over 49 years of continuous flight.
More than 8,000 people applied to become NASA astronauts in 2024, and just 10 were chosen — not simply the strongest or the fastest, but people who could master robotics, medicine, foreign languages, survival training, high-performance jets and the one skill space demands most: staying calm when nothing goes to plan.
Asteroid 16 Psyche, a metal-rich world roughly 225 kilometres wide orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, may contain extraordinary amounts of iron and nickel — enough that back-of-the-envelope estimates have put its theoretical metal value at around $10,000 quadrillion, a number so vast it dwarfs the entire global economy.
In April 2026, four Artemis II astronauts flew 406,771 kilometres from Earth — farther than any humans in history — breaking the Apollo 13 record from 1970 not by landing on the Moon, but by looping around its far side on a free-return path while the Moon’s elliptical orbit carried them just a little farther from home.
