Science
Discover facts about science. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Science
How microbes eat oil from ocean spills
Some bacteria can use the hydrocarbons in oil as fuel, breaking them down into simpler substances such as carbon dioxide and water. With oil to eat, the…
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How a little polymer can make water flow more easily
A small amount of long-chain polymer can help water flow by calming the turbulent swirls that resist its motion. The chains stretch with the moving water and…
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The platypus hunts with its eyes shut
A platypus can find prey by sensing faint electrical fields as it sweeps its bill through the water. Moving animals produce tiny signals, which help the…
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Bismuth's staircases grow when the edges outrun the centers
In a hopper crystal, material accumulates faster around a face's edges than across its middle, leaving stepped, hollow-looking shapes. A thin oxide coating…
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Why owls fly without making a sound
An owl’s wing feathers break up the rushing air instead of letting it form loud, turbulent swirls. Fine fringes along the leading edges soften the airflow,…
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The space cloud containing a raspberry flavor compound
Radio telescopes found ethyl formate in a space cloud by detecting the molecule’s distinctive radio signals. On Earth, ethyl formate contributes to raspberry…
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The fish that shoots insects out of trees
An archerfish squeezes its gill covers to fire a thin jet of water, knocking insects or spiders off low branches. But the fish has to aim past an optical…
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Quantum tunneling is one candidate for tiny DNA copying errors
Models explore how a proton can cross an energy barrier within a base pair and temporarily change its bonding pattern. If that altered form persists at the…
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Why a curveball suddenly drops and bends
A curveball’s spin changes the airflow around it, and the moving air nudges the ball sideways. The spin’s direction decides which way that push goes, so the…
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A pineapple is actually dozens of berries
Each pineapple eye marks a flower that grew into a small fruitlet. As the fruitlets swell, they fuse around a shared core, so a whole crowd of little fruits…
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Chalk is made from ancient sea life
Geological chalk is largely built from microscopic calcium-carbonate remains that accumulated on ancient seafloors. Over time, those deposits became rock. A…
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Pluto's heart has a moving glacier on one side
Sputnik Planitia, the pale western lobe of the heart-shaped region, is covered in nitrogen ice. At Pluto's temperatures, nitrogen is solid but can still flow…
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Scientists slowed a light pulse to about 17 meters per second
Lene Hau's team used an ultracold sodium gas and a second laser to alter how the gas interacted with the pulse. The pulse's progress slowed dramatically…
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Saturn's rings may be younger than the dinosaurs
Some estimates put the rings' age at roughly 100 million years, when dinosaurs were already thriving on Earth. One clue is how much dark material has…
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The materials that grow thicker when stretched
An auxetic material grows wider when pulled because its internal cells change shape as they open. Their angled walls rotate outward, like hinged panels…
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Remarkably thick and dense atmosphere of the moon Titan
Titan’s thick atmosphere gives wings plenty of air to push against, so powered flight is possible there. But the air is mostly nitrogen, not breathable…
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Strange matter could infect everything it touches
Strange matter is a hypothetical material made from strange quarks, not a substance anyone has found spreading through space. If a stable clump existed, some…
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A moving flashlight doesn’t make its beam travel faster
Moving the flashlight adds speed to the beam in everyday intuition, but light doesn’t work that way. Observers moving relative to one another measure distance…
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A teaspoon of soil teems with a billion microbes
A teaspoon of soil is a patchwork of tiny habitats, not a uniform scoop. Grains and pores hold different amounts of water, oxygen, and food, so microbes…
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Bees turn watery nectar into food that keeps
They add enzymes and remove water, including by fanning with their wings. The concentrated result is harder for microbes to spoil and can feed the colony when…
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Trees build their trunks from carbon dioxide
The trunk’s carbon takes a surprising route: it starts in carbon dioxide and ends up in wood. Leaves use sunlight to make sugars from that gas, and the tree…
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Bringing back the Tasmanian tiger starts with a tiny living relative
Researchers compare thylacine DNA with the genomes of living marsupials, including the fat-tailed dunnart. The proposed route is to edit living cells, create…
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Jupiter's moon Io helped reveal the speed of light
As Io vanished into Jupiter’s shadow again and again, astronomers could use each eclipse as a time check. When Earth moved farther from Jupiter, the light…
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Helium was found in sunlight before it was found on Earth
Helium gave itself away in sunlight. Each element absorbs or emits a particular pattern of colors, and scientists spotted helium’s distinctive yellow line in…
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