Nelson Mandela did not die in a South African prison in the 1980s. He was released in 1990, became South Africa’s first Black president in 1994 and died in 2013 at the age of 95. Yet some people have reported vivid memories of hearing about...
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Near the heart of the Milky Way lies a cloud with a reputation that sounds invented for a science-fiction cocktail menu. Sagittarius B2 contains alcohol. It also contains ethyl formate, an o...
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Imagine putting the entire Solar System on a cosmic scale: the eight planets, every known moon, the asteroids, comets, dwarf planets, dust and the enormous Sun. The result would be absurdly...
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At this moment, Earth is moving in several different ways at once. It spins on its axis, circles the Sun at roughly 30 kilometers per second, and accompanies the entire Solar System on a vas...
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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 of the strangest re...
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When Iñupiat hunters and biologists began finding ancient weapon fragments inside bowhead whales harvested in Arctic Alaska, the discoveries posed an extraordinary question: how long had the...
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From the ground, Earth is almost too large to understand. Nations fill maps. Mountain ranges divide regions. Oceans separate continents. Political borders seem concrete because they organize...
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There is a place in the South Pacific where the horizon contains nothing but water and the nearest scraps of land are roughly 2,688 kilometers away. No island marks the spot. There is no lig...
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On September 9, 1947, somebody working with one of the most advanced calculating machines in the United States opened its hardware and found an unusually literal explanation for a malfunctio...
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Ask a modern AI system about a breaking scientific discovery and the answer may arrive with links to a university, a journal and a newspaper. It can feel as though the model has opened the i...
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