Curated category
Science
- Solar SystemThe Sun holds 99.86% of all the mass in the Solar System. Everything else, the eight planets, the dwarf planets, the moons, the asteroids and comets…
- Quantum mechanicsListen to quantum mechanics told plainly: the theory that predicts everything and pictures nothing, and still unsettles the people who use it.
- DinosaurThe dinosaurs you learned as a kid were wrong. Listen to how feathers, an asteroid and living birds rewrote the story, then follow the thread.
- SupernovaA supernova can briefly shine as bright as an entire galaxy. The peak optical luminosity of one of these explosions rivals all the stars of a galaxy…
- DNADeoxyribonucleic acid, known as DNA, is a polymer built from two chains that coil around each other into a double helix.
- Big BangIt started as an insult and became the story of everything. Listen to how a priest, an antenna, and fleeing galaxies mapped the first instant.
- Black holeA black hole is not a thing but a place where light cannot escape. Listen to the idea that broke physics, and follow it to Einstein and Hawking.
- Climate changeIn 2024, Earth recorded its warmest year since regular tracking began in 1850, sitting at +1.60 C-change above the pre-industrial baseline.
- NeuronNeurons are the cells that make thought possible. Right now, somewhere in your nervous system, an electrical pulse is racing along a fiber that could stretch…
- MarsMars is the fourth planet from the Sun, a desert-like rocky world that glows orange-red in the night sky. The ancient Sumerians called it Nergal, the god of…
- Stem cellStem cells hold a property that virtually no other cell in the body possesses: the ability to become almost anything. A single stem cell can divide and…
- ScienceScience is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge as testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe.
- BacteriaBacteria were the first life forms to appear on Earth, arriving about 4 billion years ago. For roughly 3 billion years afterward, most living things were…
- VaccineA vaccine is a biological preparation that gives the body active acquired immunity to a particular infectious or malignant disease.
- PhysicsPhysics is the scientific study of matter, its fundamental constituents, and its motion and behavior through space and time, along with the related ideas of…
- EvolutionIn 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick described the double helix structure of DNA. This molecule encodes genetic information in a sequence of four bases…
- Plate tectonicsPlate tectonics describes how Earth's rigid outer shell has been slowly moving for somewhere between 3 and 4 billion years.
- GalaxyA galaxy holds, on average, an estimated 100 million stars, each one orbiting a shared center of mass that none of them will ever reach.
- AntibioticAn antibiotic is a substance active against bacteria, and the word itself carries a strange contradiction. It comes from the Greek roots anti, meaning…
- Human evolutionListen to human evolution as it really happened, not a tidy line but a tangled family tree where several kinds of human once shared the world.
- EnergyEnergy is the quantitative property transferred to a body or physical system, recognizable in the capacity to do work and in the form of heat and light.
- Special relativitySpecial relativity is a theory that Albert Einstein published on the 26th of September 1905, in a paper titled "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies." It…
- PhotonA photon has no electric charge, no rest mass, and can travel at only one speed: the speed of light in a vacuum. That is the whole of its physical biography…
- Theory of relativityThe theory of relativity arrived in two parts, separated by a decade. Albert Einstein published special relativity in 1905, then general relativity in 1915.
- Natural selectionNatural selection is the process by which heritable traits that improve survival and reproduction spread through populations over generations, while less…
- PhotosynthesisPhotosynthesis converts roughly 130 terawatts of light energy into chemical energy every moment, about eight times the total power consumption of human…
- GravityGravity is the reason an apple falls and the reason the Moon does not fly off into the dark. Isaac Newton's startling claim was that these are the same thing.
- VirusFewer than 100 particles of norovirus are enough to make a person sick. That is the infectious dose of one common virus, an agent so small it sits at…
- ElectricityElectricity is the set of physical phenomena tied to matter that carries an electric charge. Long before anyone could name it, people felt it.
- AtomAn atom is the basic particle of a chemical element, and the swarm of electrons inside it is too small to measure with any available technique.
- ThermodynamicsIn 1650, Otto von Guericke wanted to prove a Greek philosopher wrong. Aristotle had insisted that nature abhors a vacuum, that emptiness could not exist.
- GeneticsGenetics is the study of genes, genetic variation, and heredity in organisms. In the 19th century, a Moravian Augustinian friar named Gregor Mendel sat among…
- Periodic tableThe periodic table arranges the chemical elements into rows called periods and columns called groups. Hidden inside that grid is a law.
- ElectromagnetismAround 600 B.C.E., the Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus rubbed a piece of amber with cloth and watched it pick up bits of straw.