Science & Technology

At Disney World, glass bottles and jars are pulverized into the smooth gravel and sand used in greenhouses that grow the flowers for the parks and resorts.

Horsehead-shaped features seen on the sun and the clouds of Earth and Jupiter are examples of Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities, where a faster-moving fluid rolls atop a slower-moving fluid.

In the 1950s, Alan Turing developed a mathematical model to explain why animals have stripes, spots, and other patterns based on differences in how quickly two interacting chemicals spread throughout a developing organism.

Visualize network coverage for mobile carriers worldwide with maps of crowdsourced latency and download and upload speeds.

The Arctic warms more quickly than the rest of the planet because of the loss of surface ice, a lack of vertical air circulation, and the release of thermal energy as water vapor condenses.

After photons—particles of light—neutrinos are the most abundant particles in the universe.

Miracle berries make things that normally taste acidic or sour, such as lemons, taste sweet, like sugar-coated candy, by binding a special protein called miraculin to your taste buds.

Located on Ross Island in Antarctica, Mount Erebus is the southernmost active volcano on Earth and features a lava lake—one of eight known worldwide as of 2026—that erupts regularly.

The first scientifically useful photograph of a total solar eclipse was taken in Königsberg, Prussia, on July 28, 1851, using a silver-coated copper plate with a light-sensitive chemical layer.

Rising wildfire smoke can create 'fire clouds'—towering clouds that can help combat fires through downbursts of rain or complicate firefighting efforts by triggering new fires via lightning strikes.

The oldest nuclear fission reactor on Earth formed naturally in West Africa about two billion years ago, where groundwater enabled atoms in uranium deposits to split, releasing energy.

Spiders can make up to seven types of silk, with some able to withstand twice the force of ultra-high-strength steel of the same mass and length before breaking.

Structures from Ancient Rome have endured for millennia because tiny pieces of lime in Roman concrete enabled it to self-heal and prevent cracks from spreading when exposed to water.

In recent years, NIST has suggested that passwords no longer be created using a mix of symbols, numbers, and capital and lowercase letters, as was once recommended.

Avocado trees change sex throughout the day by opening and closing their male and female flowers at different times, with different avocado types following opposite schedules to promote cross-pollination.

While most cells possess DNA, red blood cells destroy their nuclei to maximize the amount of oxygen they carry and more easily alter their shape to fit through narrow blood capillaries.

Rapid intensification is the increase in a hurricane's sustained wind speed by at least 35 miles per hour within 24 hours, which can strengthen it by up to two categories.

Units involving light, such as light-seconds and light-years, describe the distances traveled by light across that amount of time.

Just as squeezing a grape causes it to bulge, the moon's gravity exerts an overall pressure that displaces water toward the opposite sides of Earth's equator, producing tides.

If the moon were less than one-twelfth its current distance from Earth, the planet's tidal forces would overcome the moon's internal gravity, tearing it apart and forming a ring of debris.

Pearls form when a saltwater oyster or a freshwater mussel coats a parasite or other irritant that has entered its shell with concentric layers of calcium carbonate and organic protein.

Although there are 10,000 possible combinations of four-digit personal identification numbers, data suggests that about 27% of all PINs are one of 20 combinations, including 1234, 1111, and 0000.

Although vinegar was first discovered when wine was left to sour after exposure to air, the fermentation of different base ingredients contributes to the variety of vinegars seen today.

Although PFAS, or forever chemicals, are intentionally designed to be extremely stable and long-lasting because of their strong carbon-fluorine bonds, these bonds can be broken by heat, plasma, and supercritical water.

Relative to its size, the world's strongest animal is the dung beetle, which can lift over 1,100 times its body weight, though the African bush elephant can lift the most weight among animals.

Compared with crocodiles, alligators are typically smaller, darker-colored, possess a more U-shaped snout, hide the fourth tooth on their lower jaw, have webbed feet, and can move their tongues.

To survive underwater hibernation, some freshwater turtles perform cloacal breathing—blood vessels absorb dissolved oxygen from water drawn into the organism's cloaca, or rear orifice.

Polar bears have black skin to better absorb warmth from the sun, but their transparent, hollow hairs scatter and reflect light so that they appear white.

Reindeers are the only known mammals whose eyes change color with the seasons, going from golden yellow in the summer to deep blue in the winter.

Nuclear power relies on chain reactions involving uranium-235, but because the isotope's concentration in natural ores is too low to sustain these reactions, enrichment is needed to produce more highly concentrated fuel.

In 2025, the European Space Agency created the first artificial solar eclipse in space when one spacecraft cast a shadow onto another spacecraft to enable observations of the sun's outermost atmosphere.

If a source of music traveled past someone at twice the speed of sound, assuming sufficiently sensitive hearing and powerful equipment, they would hear the music backward.

Although an estimated 99.999% of the deep ocean has not been explored, techniques such as sonar have been used to identify the deepest known point in each of Earth's five oceans.

Brown dwarfs are nicknamed 'failed stars' because, while much more massive than planets, they lack sufficient mass to initiate nuclear fusion in their cores and become stars.

Designing the pitches for the FIFA World Cup 2026 took turfgrass scientists about eight years, as they sought to create identical conditions for indoor and outdoor fields across North America at various altitudes and climates.

The Mars Climate Orbiter—a $125M spacecraft designed to study Martian weather and climate—was lost because ground software used imperial units while onboard software used metric units.

Across the animal kingdom, mice are among the least efficient travelers, while the efficiency of human locomotion falls between that of a cow and a horse.

Track active wildfires, floods, and other natural disasters across the US in real-time with this interactive map.

Certain objects are magnetic because their electrons' magnetic moment—an intrinsic quantum property—align within the object in specific patterns.

Explore an interactive timeline of Earth's 4.5-billion-year history to visualize shifting landmasses and oceans, view the locations of significant asteroid impacts, and learn about major geological and biological events.

Airports at high elevations, like Denver International Airport, have longer runways than most airports because airplanes cannot take off or land as quickly in thinner air.

The bullwhip was the first human-made object to break the sound barrier, producing a small sonic boom heard as a crack when flicked quickly.

In 1900, the remains of an Antikythera mechanism—a 2,000-year-old hand-powered model of the solar system and the oldest example of an analog computer—were uncovered in a shipwreck off the coast of Greece.

The history of contact lenses may have begun with Leonardo da Vinci, who developed a concept of vision correction based on placing a substance directly on the eye's surface.

A dog's nose can be up to 100,000 times more sensitive than a human's, and each possesses a secondary organ for smelling, which helps learn about other dogs when they sniff each other's butts.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, as of 2025, there are over 18,000 endangered animal species worldwide, with the share of fish, insects, mollusks, and reptiles increasing since 2007.

Washing dishware before putting it in a dishwasher may reduce the appliance's effectiveness because it dynamically adjusts wash time and temperature based on a sensor that detects dirtiness.

Of the 736 Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, and economics awarded through 2023, more than 95% come from the same academic family, having been taught by a lineage of previous winners.

Soil is the largest terrestrial carbon sink on the planet, storing almost twice as much carbon as the atmosphere and all living plants and animals combined.

Watch a visualization of what it would look like to move along Earth's surface as fast as the International Space Station, or about 23 times the speed of sound.