News
What Is a Solar Eclipse, and How Does It Happen?
For a few minutes, the Moon slides in front of the Sun and turns day into an eerie twilight. A solar eclipse is a cosmic coincidence of size and distance, and one of the few celestial events you can watch with your own eyes. Here is how it works.
What Is the Water Cycle, and How Does It Work?
The water in your glass has fallen as rain, sat in ancient oceans, and drifted through clouds countless times. The water cycle is the vast, sun-powered engine that keeps recycling it. Here is how it works.
What Are Antibiotics, and How Do They Work?
Antibiotics changed medicine forever, turning once-deadly infections into problems a pill could fix. But they only work against bacteria, and using them carelessly is quietly making them fail. Here is how antibiotics actually work.
What Is Cholesterol, and Is It Really Bad?
Cholesterol has a terrible reputation, yet your body cannot live without it. The truth is more interesting: there is a good kind and a bad kind, and the balance between them shapes your heart’s future. Here is what cholesterol really is.
What Is a Fossil, and How Does One Form?
A fossil is a message from deep time, a bone or a footprint turned to stone and waiting millions of years to be read. Here is what a fossil actually is, how one forms, and why so few living things ever become one.
What Is a Galaxy, and How Many Are There?
A galaxy is a city of stars, held together by gravity and adrift in a universe that holds hundreds of billions more like it. Ours is just one. Here is what a galaxy actually is, and how astronomers count them.
What Is a Food Chain, and How Does It Work?
Grass feeds a rabbit, a rabbit feeds a fox, and the Sun feeds all of it. A food chain is the simple thread that ties every living thing to the energy of sunlight. Here is how it works, and why the chains are always short.
What Is Photosynthesis, and How Does It Work?
Plants pull off a quiet kind of magic: they build food out of sunlight, air, and water, and hand us breathable oxygen as a bonus. Nearly every meal and every breath traces back to it. Here is how photosynthesis works.
What Is the International Space Station?
For more than two decades, humans have lived without a break aboard a laboratory the size of a football field, circling the planet every 90 minutes. Here is what the International Space Station is and why it exists.