Science & Technology

Rather than measuring the rising and falling of the sun or pendulum swings, optical clocks track the passage of time using the vibrations of atoms.

Antimatter can be created from dark lightning—high-energy light emitted by deflected electrons after they are accelerated to near the speed of light by thunderstorms.

View high-resolution maps of how El Niño and La Niña affect weather patterns around the world at different times of year.

The colors of auroras change with the intensity of solar activity and with altitude because of differences in atmospheric density and chemical composition.

The first battery was invented to settle a dispute over what caused severed frog legs to twitch when connected to different metals.

Watch a visualization of global ocean currents from NASA's Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean project.

If Earth's water were suddenly replaced with air, forest fires would burn most of the world's vegetation within years.

Data suggests that claims about the golden ratio underlying the geometry seen in nature, from mollusk shells to human proportions, are largely exaggerated.

Explore an interactive visualization of greenhouse gas emissions from 745 million sources worldwide.

The world's first artificial element, technetium, was discovered 68 years after its existence was predicted in order to fill a gap in the periodic table.

Beyond a certain pressure and temperature, matter can become a supercritical fluid—an exotic state of matter that simultaneously exhibits properties of gases and liquids.

View the biggest threats to biodiversity, according to the World Wildlife Fund, led by changes to species' environments, species overexploitation, and invasive species.

View a gallery of photographs of Uranus taken during NASA missions.

A hidden chamber was found in the Great Pyramid of Giza by measuring particles created in the collisions between cosmic rays and atmospheric particles.

Earth's oceans do mix, despite viral images and videos claiming to show boundaries between oceans that waters do not cross.

Compare the true sizes of continents, countries, and other regions around the world by dragging them across a Mercator projection.

Introduced in 1981 for $1,795, the Osborne 1 was the world's first commercially successful portable laptop, despite weighing 24.5 pounds and having no battery.

View a timeline of the universe's major events, according to the Big Bang model.

The world's first text message was sent on Dec. 3, 1992, when 22-year-old engineer Neil Papworth sent 'Merry Christmas' from a computer terminal.

Although burning most objects causes them to lose mass because some of their solid material turns into gas, metals become heavier when burned because they absorb oxygen.

When bleach comes into contact with oily skin, it forms soap—the combination of an alkaline, non-acidic substance with a fat.

With a height three times that of Mount Everest and an area roughly the size of Poland, the Martian shield volcano Olympus Mons is the largest volcano in the solar system.

At 0.01 degrees Celsius (32.02 degrees Fahrenheit) and about 0.6% of Earth's surface pressure, water simultaneously exists as a solid, liquid, and a gas.

The faint triangle of light occasionally seen above the horizon, known as zodiacal light, is due to sunlight reflecting off ice and dust scattered throughout the inner solar system.

As many as 100,000 fire ants can interlock with one another and form a living raft to save their colony when at risk of drowning in rising water.

Bluetooth, the technology that connects nearby devices via radio waves, is named after King Harald 'Bluetooth' Gormsson, who united Denmark and Norway in the 10th century.

Surface ocean currents are primarily driven by wind, tides, and Earth's rotation, while deep-ocean currents are driven by differences in temperature and salt concentration that create vertical circulation.

The air around lightning can reach a temperature of about 30,000 degrees Celsius (54,000 degrees Fahrenheit)—five times hotter than the surface of the sun.

View a list of the 25 most common passwords according to an analysis of 2.5 terabytes of public data breaches.

It is impossible for a telescope to ever see the Big Bang and the beginning of time because light in the early universe was trapped in a dense 'cosmic fog' of elementary particles.

With less than 50 milligrams present in the top kilometer of Earth's crust at any given time, astatine is the rarest naturally occurring element on the planet.

While constructing the tunnel connecting the UK and France, satellite positioning systems were supplemented by paleontologists on either side of the tunnel, who analyzed fossils to ensure excavation was at the correct depth.

The South American lungfish has the largest known animal genome, with 91 billion base pairs—a set of genetic instructions about 30 times larger than a human's.

Spiral galaxies get their arms, in part, from cosmic traffic jams, in which faster orbiting matter slows down and bunches up before proceeding at higher speed once more.

Scientists define sea level as the elevation to which water would settle on Earth's surface, given the planet's gravitational field and rotation.

Since 1967, a second has been defined as how long it takes an electron to transition between two energy levels of a cesium-133 atom 9,192,631,770 times.

Airport security scanners use X-rays to infer baggage contents, with newer machines combining images taken at multiple angles and with various X-ray energies for improved threat detection.

Collections of stars like the Big Dipper are not constellations because they are not among the 88 groups of stars designated as such by the Astronomical Congress.

When helicopters fly near sandy surfaces, these granular particles can strip off fragments from a blade's abrasion strip, which then quickly react with the air and ignite, producing rings of light.

The flavor of food can be enhanced by combining chemicals known to trigger umami taste receptors with nucleotides—building blocks of DNA and RNA—triggering an effect called umami synergy.

On credit and debit cards, magnetic stripes have been slowly replaced by microchips that use dynamic, encrypted data to prevent card cloning and counterfeit fraud.

Through sonoluminescence, concentrated sound waves can produce short, high-intensity flashes of light by rapidly collapsing microscopic bubbles to temperatures up to twice that of the sun's surface.

As of 2025, LUX-ZEPLIN is the world's most sensitive dark matter experiment, which is designed to indirectly detect a potential candidate for the invisible form of matter.

You have never made physical contact with anything in your life because electrons in the outer layer of atoms on the surface of objects repel one another.

Self-driving car companies like Waymo use LiDAR technology for navigation, which constructs 3D maps of a car's surroundings by emitting light pulses in all directions.

In the US, flash floods—rapid floods that occur within six hours of rain—kill more people than tornadoes, hurricanes, and lightning.

As crystals form, their properties and the shapes they take on, including cubic, tetragonal, and hexagonal patterns, reflect the arrangement of their constituent atoms.

The deaths of massive stars and the mergers of neutron stars and black holes can produce gamma-ray bursts—jets of particles moving in opposite directions at near-light speed that comprise the universe's most powerful explosions.

Airplanes generate enough lift to fly by accelerating air faster over their moving wings, which makes the pressure above the wings lower than the pressure below.

Among the smallest mass-produced mechanical calculators in history, the Curta was designed by Austrian engineer Curt Herzstark while imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.