Science — older stories

A new metric called the CRASH Clock measures how many days it would take for a first satellite collision in low Earth orbit if all maneuvering stopped, and its authors just revised the number sharply downward.

A bar of soap left untouched for years still lathers fine. That's partly chemistry — and partly a quirk of FDA regulation that exempts true soap from the rules covering cosmetics and drugs.

Toilets don't flush counterclockwise in one hemisphere and clockwise in the other. What actually decides the swirl is jet angle and bowl geometry, not planetary rotation.

A single lightning bolt can sound like a sharp crack in one spot and a rolling rumble a few miles away, and the split comes down to how far its miles-long channel is from your ear.

Solar Cycle 25 hit its peak in October 2024, but the history of two previous cycles suggests the biggest flares — and the biggest light shows — can still be ahead in 2026.

Your compass isn't pointing at the North Pole. It's pointing at a wandering magnetic point currently 1,200 miles away and drifting toward Siberia.

Uranus is the only planet that spins on its side. The classic explanation is a violent collision, but a newer theory blames a moon that slowly tilted the planet, then destroyed itself.

For 60 years physicists couldn't agree whether hot water really freezes faster than cold. A 2025 study finally explains why the effect is real, and why it's mostly chance.

The shiny and dull sides of aluminum foil come from a manufacturing quirk, not a cooking rule — and lab tests show almost no difference between them.

A commercial spacecraft is trying to catch a falling NASA telescope before it burns up -- a real-time lesson in why nothing stays in orbit forever.

A lightning bolt makes one discharge. What you hear afterward depends entirely on how far away you're standing when the sound arrives.

The voice you hear in your head and the one everyone else hears aren't the same signal, and the difference comes down to a wiring quirk in your skull.

Planes chase headwinds on purpose: a 20-knot wind at the nose can cut takeoff and landing ground speeds by 20 knots or more, which is why runways face different directions depending on the day.

Static shocks from car doors spike in dry, cold weather for a specific physics reason involving friction, fabric and where the charge finally finds ground.

Three space-weather words get used interchangeably and describe three different things. The sequence, not the synonym, explains what actually reaches the ground.

Kp is a three-hour magnetism index that aurora chasers borrowed. It tells you whether tonight is worth staying up for, and almost nothing about whether you will actually see the northern lights.

A solar flare mostly scrambles radio and GPS. The real grid threat is the coronal mass ejection behind it. Here is how a geomagnetic storm damages transformers.

The $30 million mission is the first attempt by a private spacecraft to capture a U.S. government satellite that was never built to be caught.

A University of Minnesota team says its lab-built "SpudCell" can feed, grow and divide using only non-living parts, a milestone that comes with an asterisk: peer review hasn't happened yet.

NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center has issued a G2 geomagnetic storm watch for July 3 after the sun’s biggest flare of the week triggered radio blackouts across North America.