The Sun Owns Almost All the Mass in the Solar System
Imagine putting the entire Solar System on a cosmic scale: the eight planets, every known moon, the asteroids, comets, dwarf...
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Earth Is Moving Far Faster Than You Think — But Its Path Is Not a Simple Spiral
At this moment, Earth is moving in several different ways at once. It spins on its axis, circles the Sun at roughly 30 kilome...
What Does Space Smell Like? The Strange Scent Astronauts Bring Back Inside
Space is a vacuum, so an astronaut cannot simply lift a visor and take a sniff. Yet crews returning from spacewalks have repeatedly described something remarkably close t...
Mexico’s Zone of Silence: The Desert Mystery That Science Never Confirmed
In the Chihuahuan Desert of northern Mexico, where Durango, Chihuahua and Coahuila approach one another across an immense dry basin, a patch of landscape has acquired one...
Bismuth-209: The “Stable” Atom That Takes 19 Quintillion Years to Decay
For generations, chemistry books could place bismuth near the end of the periodic table's stable territory. Its naturally occurring isotope, bismuth-209, showed no detect...
The Piri Reis Map: Did an Ottoman Admiral Really Map Antarctica in 1513?
In 1929, while scholars were cataloguing manuscripts in Istanbul's Topkapı Palace, they encountered a fragment of an extraordinary world map. Painted in vivid colors on p...