Space & Missions The world can't agree where space begins, and 20 km of dispute now matters The 100 km Kármán line is a 1960 convention, the physics gives different answers depending on the question, ...

According to the WMO, the meteorological station at Verkhoyansk has been observing temperatures since 1885, one of the longer records anywhere in the high north. The town has a population of slightly ...

Earth & Life Woman finds 132-year-old message in a bottle on Australian beach, note matches ship's log perfectly A German oceanographer's 1886 experiment in drift-tracking survived 132 years at sea to ...

Zip yourself into a padded cubicle barely wider than your shoulders, strap down so you do not drift into the wall overnight, then try to ignore the fourth sunrise since dinner. NASA writes eight and a ...

In April 1967, a robotic NASA lander called Surveyor 3 settled onto the Ocean of Storms, scooped at the lunar soil, sent home more than 6,000 photographs, and then went quiet as the two-week lunar ...

Fine filaments and root hairs in topsoil. Arbuscular mycorrhizal hyphae themselves are far thinner — 10 to 50 times narrower than a human hair. It would also stretch a little over a tenth of the way ...

Science & Engineering Cells have a built-in counter that both ages bodies and fights cancer The protective caps on human chromosomes shorten by 50 to 100 base pairs every time a cell divides, and once ...

A deep optical search around three galaxies has produced 47 dwarf-galaxy candidates in a patch of sky where only four had been reported before. The jump is striking, though the 43 new objects are ...

Not many charts get famous. Stock tickers don’t count, and neither does the pie chart from a meeting nobody remembers a week later. But there’s one jagged, climbing line that keeps turning up ...

Artist's concept showing how accretion may change as pulsar GX 301−2 crosses a dense plasma stream from Wray 977. Left: a turbulent disk forms. Centre: the disk breaks apart and plasma flows directly ...

TOI-1355 b is visible in transit now, but probably not for much longer. A team led by Noriharu Watanabe of the University of Tokyo reports that the giant planet’s path across its star has moved ...

In 1993 a NASA engineer published a paper whose title amounted to a playground taunt. Active Pixel Sensors: Are CCD’s Dinosaurs? argued that the imaging technology that had just conquered astronomy, ...