Science Blog

Of shark, ray and chimaera species on the IUCN Red List, more than one in three is now threatened with extinction
At the surface of the Sun, sunlight takes about 8 minutes to reach Earth, but its energy spent an estimated 100,000 years diffusing outward through the Sun’s dense radiative zone before it escaped — meaning the energy warming your skin this afternoon was generated in the core when Neanderthals were still walking Europe
In 98 years of the University of Queensland pitch drop experiment, nine drops have fallen and no human has ever seen one land
The bootlace worm, a ribbon of black slime found tangled on North Sea beaches, can stretch to more than 55 metres (longer than a blue whale), making it arguably the longest animal on Earth, and its skin secretes a neurotoxin that killed cockroaches and crabs after laboratory injection
The Eighth Circuit ruled that when a pipeline company exercises federal eminent domain power, federal law displaces North Dakota’s statute requiring reimbursement of a landowner’s attorney fees — a reversal of the trial court that the Supreme Court has now agreed to review
In 1962, French geologist Michel Siffre climbed into a glacier cave in the Alps with no clock and no sunlight and stayed for two months, and when his team called him up on 14 September he insisted it was still 20 August, some of the earliest evidence that human circadian rhythm drifts free of any external cue
Primatologist Shirley Strum has spent more than fifty years following the same olive baboons in Kenya, and what she found was not a hierarchy of aggressive males but a society running on friendship, memory of who helped whom, and constant negotiation
In 1991, two hikers in the Ötztal Alps found a body sticking out of the melting ice and assumed it was a recent climber, but the corpse turned out to be a 5,300-year-old man with an arrowhead in his shoulder, 61 tattoos, and a 99.7%-pure copper axe whose metal was traced to southern Tuscany, revealing long-distance Copper Age connections
When Friedrich Miescher isolated a strange phosphorus-rich substance from the pus-soaked bandages of wounded soldiers in a Tübingen laboratory in 1869, he called it nuclein and had no idea he had just held the first purified sample of DNA, seventy-four years before Avery would show it carried the code of life
Roman concrete piers built two thousand years ago along the Mediterranean coast are stronger now than the day they were poured, because seawater seeping into the volcanic ash mix triggers the slow growth of a rare crystal called aluminous tobermorite that welds new cracks shut
We tend to picture the Sahara as an eternal desert, but sediment cores and cave paintings show that as recently as 6,000 years ago it was a green savanna crossed by rivers and lakes, populated by hippos, crocodiles and cattle-herding people whose rock art still survives on the walls of Tassili n’Ajjer
Quote by Viktor Frankl: Between stimulus and response there is a space, in that space is our power to choose our response, and in our response lies our growth and our freedom
A coastal redwood named Hyperion stands 115.9 metres tall in a hidden fold of Redwood National Park, taller than the Statue of Liberty, and the National Park Service refuses to disclose its location after tourists trampled the root system of the previous record-holder
The Paradoxical Politics of Climate
Every year, roughly 27.7 million tonnes of dust lift off the Bodélé Depression in Chad, cross 5,000 kilometres of Atlantic Ocean, and settle on the Amazon rainforest, delivering the phosphorus that keeps the world’s largest jungle from starving its own soil
Some of the loneliest people in their sixties are the ones who spent forty years being described as easy, low-maintenance, and never a bother, because the description was true and no one thought to ask what it cost
Psychology says adults who cannot nap without setting three alarms, closing every door, and telling someone where they’ll be aren’t overly cautious, they never had the kind of childhood where resting felt like something the world would let them get away with
Psychology suggests adults who prefer eating alone at restaurants aren’t lonely or antisocial, they’ve learned that a meal without emotional labour is one of the few forms of rest they can actually count on

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