Science & Technology

The world's longest-running evolution experiment has tracked genetic changes in E. coli across more than 74,000 generations since 1988.

You can sharpen your vision by looking through a pinhole—the equivalent of narrowing a camera's aperture to reduce blurriness.

Dividing by zero is impossible because a potential quotient would create fundamental contradictions, such as 0 = 1.

Hummingbirds are the only birds that can perform sustained backward flight.

Female Komodo dragons can have virgin births, in which unfertilized eggs only produce male hatchlings.

Nicknamed 'corpse crystals,' vivianite can grow on dead bodies if phosphate from decomposing remains combines with iron and water.

In space, fire produces spherical flames rather than the rising ones seen on Earth.

Listen to a reconstruction of the sound of the Big Bang—the first sound of the universe.

Analyzing crystals from wine production byproducts led scientists to discover that some molecules have mirror-image versions with distinct characteristics.

Margaret Hamilton, NASA's first software engineer, led the development of the onboard flight program for NASA's Apollo program.

Every organism on Earth evolved from a single cell—the last universal common ancestor—which lived about 4.2 billion years ago, research suggests.

Jupiter was twice its current size when it formed 4.5 billion years ago.

Deep divers would feel drunk underwater if their air supply did not include helium.

GPS satellites would fail within minutes if they didn't recalibrate according to Einstein's theories of relativity.

The dark web makes up about 0.01% of the data on the internet and requires specialized software to access.

Explore an interactive database of critical minerals and their uses.

Black holes have locked away about 1% of all the matter in the universe, according to research.

You can measure the speed of light with a microwave oven and chocolate, cheese, or other uniformly thick foods.

If the Earth stopped spinning, about 85% of the world's population would experience supersonic winds.

Watch a time-lapse of the 120-day journey of a pumpkin seed growing into an adult fruit.

Electrogenic animals generate their own electricity by changing the pattern of electrical charges in disc-shaped cells called electrocytes.

'Hacking' was not associated with manipulating technology in creative ways until a 1955 meeting of the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club.

A full-ring, ultraviolet view of the Northern Lights was captured for the first time in almost two decades by the European-Chinese Smile mission in 2026.

Run your own particle physics lab in a clicker game made at CERN, turning collision data into discoveries, reputation, and funding.

See what the sun looks like in different wavelengths of light, each revealing features the others can't show.

Tardigrades can survive up to 3,000 times more radiation than humans thanks to Dsup—a damage-suppression protein.

Explore an interactive map of volcanoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis from 2150 BCE to the present.

The internet is not what you see when navigating online—that's the World Wide Web, which is supported by hardware called the internet.

Crude oil can be sweet, sour, heavy, or light depending on its density and chemical composition.

About 50 billion to 70 billion cells intentionally die in the average adult human body every day.

Bill Nye accidentally became 'the Science Guy' when filling the time left by a canceled guest on a sketch comedy show.

Synthetic pheromones may protect coral reefs by luring their sea star predators to divers, who can cull them in bulk instead of one by one.

Explore the parts inside a wind turbine, from the gearbox and generator to the yaw drive that turns it to face the wind.

The 'dirty side' of a hurricane is where tornadoes, storm surges, and flooding risks are greatest.

See what space trash is passing overhead at your location with a real-time map of satellites and debris circling in low Earth orbit.

Auroras produce crackling, popping, and rustling sounds, according to anecdotal reports from people in Arctic regions, though scientists have dismissed these claims.

Some sharks can hear underwater sounds up to 74 meters (243 feet) away and identify the direction of the source.

Algae are responsible for about half of Earth's atmospheric oxygen and can capture carbon dioxide at rates up to 50 times faster than land-based plants.

Tsunamis are caused by a massive volume of water being suddenly displaced, as occurs when the seafloor shifts due to geological events such as earthquakes.

CRISPR allows scientists to precisely cut out and replace faulty or unwanted DNA to help treat genetic disorders.

Google fired proton beams at its AI chips to see whether they could survive five years of cosmic radiation in orbiting data centers

If the universe continues to expand forever, as current cosmological models suggest, it will eventually reach heat death, becoming a cold, dark, and empty void.

There are about 3 trillion trees on Earth, research suggests—a number larger than the amount of stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

In the absence of air resistance—as occurs in a vacuum chamber—all objects fall at the same rate.

Swimming in a pool of spent nuclear fuel is safe, as long as you don't drink the water or touch radioactive waste.

The seafloor contains hundreds of brine pools—underwater lakes that are many times saltier than the surrounding ocean and lethal to most marine creatures.

The strong nuclear force prevents most atoms from spontaneously breaking apart, even though protons in the nucleus repel one another.

Linux and other open-source software can still be safe and secure because they enable many individuals to actively monitor and review publicly available source code.

Kryptos is a long-unsolved cryptographic sculpture—a piece of art with encoded messages—located outside the CIA's headquarters.

View a gallery of bioluminescent organisms, including snails, worms, fungi, jellyfish, and mushrooms.