Science & Technology

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.

All hurricanes have a central eye, where no extreme weather occurs, surrounded by intense winds and thunderstorms.

View a breakdown of the elemental composition of the major celestial bodies in the solar system.

The Foucault pendulum is direct evidence that the Earth rotates, as the apparent change in the plane of its swing results from the ground beneath the pendulum rotating over several hours.

In a standard deck of 52 cards, shuffling produces one of approximately 8.07 × 10⁶⁷ potential card orders—a number about as large as the number of atoms in the Milky Way.

The QWERTY layout first appeared in the Sholes and Glidden typewriter, sold starting in 1874 by the E. Remington and Sons gun manufacturer, which was looking to diversify after the Civil War.

The world's largest deserts—areas that receive less than 10 inches of annual rainfall—are led by the Antarctic and Arctic regions.

Although many insects are colloquially referred to as bugs, insects are only considered true bugs if they possess a proboscis—a straw-like mouthpart that can pierce surfaces and suck up fluids.

Although consuming saltwater can dehydrate and kill organisms, some fish survive by using specialized gills that leach excess salt from their bodies back into the surrounding water.

View a dashboard of real-time data and forecasts of US nocturnal bird migration.

Listen to what a forest in the Jurassic Period may have sounded like with this reconstructed soundscape, which was created by analyzing the fossilized wings of 165 million-year-old insects.

If there were a swimming pool on the moon, where gravity is about one-sixth that of Earth, championship finswimmers could potentially launch themselves up to 5 meters (16 feet) in the air.

One of the first mechanical calculators—the Pascaline—was built in 1643 by French mathematician Blaise Pascal to help his father, who worked as a tax collector.

Chameleons change color by altering the spacing of nanocrystals under their skin, which changes what colors of light are absorbed and reflected.

Flamingos get their pink coloring from carotenoids—pigments of yellow, orange, and red—in their food, but they cannot take on other colorations because their bodies cannot process other pigments.

Thunderquakes—seismic waves created when lightning strikes the ground—have enabled scientists to image underground environments near Earth's surface by detecting vibrations along subterranean fiber-optic cables.

Known as bullet trains in English, the Shinkansen uses electric motors, aerodynamic design, and infrastructure that prioritizes straightaways to travel at speeds equivalent to commercial planes' takeoff velocity.

The British Antarctic Survey created a map of what Antarctica would look like if it lost all 27 million cubic kilometers (6.5 million cubic miles) of its ice—enough to fill almost 6,500 Grand Canyons.

Trick a large language model into revealing secret passwords over multiple rounds, each with increasing safeguards.

The underlying fabric of the universe—spacetime—changes shape in the presence of mass and energy, which affects measurements of space and time.

Explore a map of data centers worldwide, numbering over 12,250 as of August 2026, with over 4,500 in the US.

View an illustrated history of Microsoft Solitaire, first released as part of the Windows 3.0 operating system in 1990 to help users get familiar with using a mouse.

The Planck time, equal to 5.39 × 10⁻⁴³ seconds or less than a millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, is the smallest unit of time that could ever be theoretically measured.

The list of historic volcanic eruptions includes the 1883 blast from Krakatau, which killed more than 36,000 and was the first such event to be documented in real time, thanks to the telegraph.

Aimed at increasing user engagement, social media algorithms will intentionally show content in feeds that is misaligned with users' beliefs because such content is more likely to be commented on.

The average banana produces one positron—the antimatter counterpart to an electron—every 75 minutes as its trace amounts of radioactive potassium decay.

The movement of molten metal around Earth's inner core creates the planet's magnetic field, whose north and south poles do not align with the planet's geographic poles.

Rather than removable armor like snail shells, turtle shells are part of the organism's skeleton and consist of 50 to 60 fused bones that grow with the organism.

Released in 2024, the polarized image of Sagittarius A* shows that the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way exhibits powerful, spiraling magnetic fields.

The moon is slowly contracting as its interior cools, creating moonquakes and lobate scarps—cliffs that are steep on one side and gently sloping on the other—as the moon's surface buckles.

As of 2026, the rarest mineral on Earth may be kyawthuite, an orange gemstone whose only known specimen was found in Myanmar in 2010.