The remains of the Endurance, which sank in 1915 Science History Images / Alamy It has been 110 years since Endurance, often described as the strongest wooden ship ever built, sank after becoming trapped in sea ice near Antarctica. But a reassessment of the evidence reveals that Endurance was actually far weaker than other polar…
GLP-1 injections use needles and require refrigeration. Pills that work in a similar way could be a cheaper, simpler solution.
Prime numbers are sometimes called math’s “atoms” because they can be divided by only themselves and 1. For two millennia, mathematicians have wondered if the prime numbers are truly random, or if some unknown pattern underlies their ordering. Recently number theorists have proposed several surprising conjectures on prime patterns—in particular, probabilistic patterns that show up…
Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi are announced as the winners of the 2025 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine by committee secretary general Thomas Perlmann JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP via Getty Images The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has gone to three researchers – Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi – who…
Seth Cluett: This experiment just pops a balloon. And normally, when a balloon would pop, you’d hear [makes an exploding noise]—the whole room just kind of expand, right? [Pops a balloon inside a normal room, making a loud noise.] Rachel Feltman: Ooh! On supporting science journalism If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning…
If there is an absolute law in the universe, it’s that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. For science-fiction enthusiasts, that’s a bit depressing. Space is big, and while the speed of light is incredibly fast to us humans, on interstellar scales it’s glacially slow. Even at a photon’s speed of about…
Find a string. Really. Do it. Now twist, tie and tangle it as much as you like. Finally, attach the two loose ends of your string together to make a closed loop. (This is a crucial step.) What you hold in your hands is one of the most exciting mathematical objects of the 20th century:…
Our planet is sick, and its life-threatening symptoms are getting worse, a new report warns. Earth has been pushed past multiple physical and chemical boundaries crucial for keeping the world a livable place. Beyond already exceeded thresholds set by scientists for rising temperatures, biodiversity loss and chemical pollution, we have now also breached the boundary…
Illustration showing NASA’s DART probe, upper right, on course to strike the asteroid Dimorphos, left, which orbits Didymos Steve Gribben/Johns Hopkins APL/NASA/AP/Alamy After NASA smashed a spacecraft into an asteroid, its orbit slowly but surely changed over the next month, and astronomers can’t explain why. In 2022, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) flew a…
Black holes are eaters of all things, even radiation. But what if their rapacious appetites had an unexpected side effect? A new study published in Physical Review Letters suggests that black holes might spew dark energy—and that they could help explain an intriguing conflict between different measurements of the universe. Dark energy is the force…
