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Science that sounds like science fiction.
The Carrington Event is the strongest geomagnetic storm ever recorded — it kept the telegraph network running even after operators cut the power.
Learn more →The classic double-slit experiment shows that the very act of measurement changes how particles behave — it doesn't just describe them.
Learn more →Entangled quantum particles respond to a measurement on the other one almost instantly, no matter how far apart they are.
Learn more →At the so-called triple point, liquid water, ice, and steam all coexist at once in a single, stable state.
Learn more →The total length of DNA in every cell of one human, laid end to end, dwarfs the Earth-Sun distance many times over.
Learn more →Laser cooling uses light not to heat things up, but to slow atoms down to temperatures near absolute zero.
Learn more →Millimeter-sized animals sent into orbit survived cosmic UV radiation and the vacuum of space with zero protection.
Learn more →The natural potassium in bananas contains just enough of a radioactive isotope that physicists invented a joke unit called the "banana dose."
Learn more →Gallium has a melting point lower than body temperature, so it turns liquid the moment you hold it.
Learn more →According to general relativity, gravity slows time down — the farther you are from Earth's mass, the faster your clock ticks.
Learn more →Cephalopods make heavy use of RNA editing to fine-tune their proteins to conditions, instead of relying solely on DNA mutations.
Learn more →The popular myth of flowing glass actually comes from an old manufacturing technique, not the material being liquid on a human timescale.
Learn more →Producing antimatter in particle accelerators is so energy-intensive that its hypothetical cost runs into the trillions of dollars per gram.
Learn more →Mantis shrimp have up to a dozen or more types of color receptors, compared to just three in humans.
Learn more →Ordinary matter — stars, planets, people — makes up only a tiny fraction of everything the universe actually contains.
Learn more →Shape-memory alloys like nitinol return to their original form when heated, even after being badly bent out of shape.
Learn more →Sunlight takes eight minutes to reach Earth, but the energy from the Sun's core takes far, far longer to fight its way out of the Sun itself.
Learn more →Metal-reducing bacteria use iron or manganese oxide as an electron acceptor instead of oxygen, literally "breathing rock."
Learn more →Erwin Schrödinger came up with his famous thought experiment as a critique of how absurd a certain interpretation of quantum physics was.
Learn more →Ophiocordyceps fungi force infected ants to climb vegetation before erupting from their heads.
Learn more →Qubits exploit superposition, letting quantum computations explore many possibilities in parallel before collapsing to one result.
Learn more →A cornstarch-and-water mixture is a non-Newtonian fluid that hardens under sudden force but flows like a liquid when moved slowly.
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