Science & Technology

On a cruise ship, the average person uses about 50 gallons of water a day, which is treated by bacteria and onboard filtration systems, then stored until the ship can legally discharge the wastewater.

If the temperature of water continuously decreases but it is not given room to expand, it will eventually contract and form exotic forms of ice that would sink in liquid water.

Drum shields—barriers that drummers are often seen playing behind—help prevent drums from being picked up by other onstage microphones, thereby improving audio mix quality.

In 1962, the US detonated a nuclear weapon in space, which produced an electromagnetic pulse that disabled three low Earth orbit satellites and damaged electrical equipment in Hawaii.

Quarks are fundamental particles that come in six varieties and combine together to form larger, composite particles, such as the proton and the neutron.

Scientists can create movies of atomic and molecular phenomena using X-ray free-electron lasers, in which images are produced by matter being struck by high-intensity light created by accelerating electrons.

While all other fish are cold-blooded—their body temperatures match their surroundings—the opah, or moonfish, is warm-blooded, with a body temperature about 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than its environment.

The world's first chatbot, ELIZA, was developed in the 1960s as a technical demonstration exploring human-computer communication, with one of its scripts allowing it to emulate a psychotherapist.

Light takes approximately eight minutes to travel from the sun's surface to Earth, but it takes thousands of years to reach the star's surface from its core—a distance more than 200 times shorter.

Computer systems create artificial voices by stitching together phonemes—individual sounds that make up speech, such as 't,' 'long a,' and 'k' to say 'take.'

Objects can be made invisible through refraction, in which light from behind an object is bent around it, making only the background visible.

When GPS and sonar are unavailable, submarine navigation relies on a fiber-optic gyroscope to determine the vessel's orientation and an accelerometer to calculate distance traveled.

Explore an interactive solar system with 3D visualizations of meteor showers—streams of dust-like debris left behind from comets or asteroids that burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

Although the moon passes between the sun and Earth each month, its orbit is tilted by five degrees, preventing Earth from experiencing a solar eclipse each month.

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.