Science — older stories

Trains can't steer their wheels independently, so tight curves force a stick-slip vibration that turns steel into a very loud, unintentional bell.

Water's density peaks at 39.2°F, not at freezing. That single anomaly drives the seasonal mixing that keeps a lake's deep water breathing.

Red light protects a submarine crew's night vision before a periscope watch. A Coast Guard researcher's blunt 2002 verdict complicates the tidy version of that story.

Unpopped "old maids" aren't random. A Purdue food chemist found the difference between a good popper and a dud comes down to moisture and a kernel's cellulose hull.

Tuesday's magnitude 7.1 Kumamoto earthquake struck as one sudden jolt, while sequences in the Philippines and the Canary Islands unfolded as sprawling swarms. The difference comes down to fluid, not fault size.

Plants that fold their leaves at night aren't wilting or sleeping — they're running an evolved, energy-spending routine called nyctinasty.

The Schumann resonance is a real electromagnetic hum circling the planet, discovered in 1952 and confirmed in 1960. Here's the physics, and why the wellness claims built on it don't hold up.

NASA, ESA, MIT and University of Arizona scientists agree the space-debris cascade is plausible. They do not agree on whether it has already begun, or how bad it gets from here.

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.