Giant sunspot on the solar disk imaged by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory on 24 October 2014 — thematic full-disk sunspot imagery. Credit: NASA/SDO, public domain. That number matters because of ...

A registered beefalo, the bison-cattle breed at the centre of the study. Credit: Karl Young, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. A bull called Joe’s Pride changed hands in 1975 for $2.5 million. His ...

Webb data indicate Chariklo's dense inner ring grew more opaque while its tenuous outer ring faded, though wavelength-dependent grain behaviour remains an alternative explanation.

Two and a bit tonnes of snapped rock, stacked into neat circles, in a chamber that has never once seen daylight. Nobody has worked out why. Bruniquel Cave sits above the Aveyron gorges in the ...

The National Geodetic Survey has spent years building a replacement for the reference system that fixes every published position in the country. New geodetic-control submissions into the old system ...

There are roughly two occasions in the entire history of human cartography when a working continental map has felt obliged to include a single individual tree as a labelled feature. Both are in Niger.

Sea-surface temperature anomaly of the global ocean at end of June 2026 (Copernicus Climate Change Service / ECMWF). The world’s oceans are hotter than instruments have ever recorded them, the ...

A hole in the bedroom ceiling, black grit spread across the bed, and a smell like struck matches. Nobody signed for it. The delivery had been a long time coming. On 16 July 2024, a fireball crossed ...

Leonardo da Vinci had no children, which makes the six Italian men now sharing matching Da Vinci paternal Y-chromosome markers a strange sort of heir. They descend instead from his father, Ser Piero ...

René Descartes decided the soul entered the body through the pineal gland, a lump of tissue roughly the size of a rice grain, buried near the centre of the brain. Palaeontologist Julien Benoit, ...

A slab catalogued as Praearcturus sp. in the Yale Peabody Museum invertebrate palaeontology collection, showing the pustulose ornament the revision uses as a Praearcturus character. It is not one of ...

GOES-West view of eastern Pacific tropical cyclones including Marie, 3 September 2026 (NOAA/NESDIS, public domain via Wikimedia Commons). Hurricane Marie was still well out in the eastern Pacific, ...