Editorial Team
Four thousand metres down, in the darkest and quietest part of the central Pacific Ocean, there is a region the size of the continental United States where the seafloor is scattered with small dark rocks.
Jul 16, 2026
Under the sand and rock of North Africa, water fills porous layers of sandstone across areas larger than many countries.
Jul 16, 2026
Space does not begin at a clean edge where Earth's air abruptly stops. The atmosphere thins continuously, molecule by molecule, until its outermost hydrogen becomes almost indistinguishable from the surrounding interplanetary environment.
Jul 16, 2026
A dog looks at its owner. The owner looks back. In a widely cited experiment, the longer that gaze lasted, the more oxytocin appeared in urine samples from both members of the pair.
Jul 16, 2026
Across a dry lakebed in one of the hottest places on Earth, heavy rocks leave long trails in the mud as if they have travelled under their own power.
Jul 16, 2026
An air filter does more than collect soot, pollen and dust. Mixed into those particles are microscopic traces shed by nearly every living thing nearby: fragments of skin, hair, feathers, leaves, spores, saliva, faeces, microbes and viruses.
Jul 15, 2026
Nearly two billion years before engineers built the first nuclear reactor, water seeped through uranium-rich rock beneath what is now Gabon and helped start a self-sustaining chain reaction.
Jul 15, 2026
At its height, Tenochtitlan was one of the largest cities on Earth. It stood in a lake, had no tractors, synthetic nitrogen or refrigerated supply chains, yet its markets received a steady flow of maize, beans, squash, chillies, tomatoes, greens and flowers.
Jul 15, 2026
For most concrete, seawater is an enemy. Salt penetrates pores, chemical reactions disrupt the cement paste and chlorides can reach steel reinforcement, where corrosion expands and cracks the surrounding material.
Jul 15, 2026
A fully grown Turritopsis dohrnii is easy to overlook. Its transparent bell is only a few millimetres across, often around three millimetres and no more than about 4.5 millimetres.
Jul 15, 2026
There is a version of the Voyager story that sounds almost too clean: engineers built a spacecraft they knew they would never see leave the solar system, and sent it outward anyway.
Jul 15, 2026
At Sparkler Filters in Conroe, Texas, accounting once meant carrying a deck of punched cards to an IBM 402, fitting the correct wired control panel into its side and listening as relays and mechanical counters turned the cards into a printed report.
Jul 15, 2026
In the deep waters of the Arctic and North Atlantic, the Greenland shark lives on a timescale that is difficult to observe directly.
Jul 15, 2026
A standard 250-gram cotton T-shirt has an estimated total water footprint of about 2,720 litres in the Chapagain and Hoekstra calculation.
Jul 15, 2026
