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Your dentist is part of your longevity program

The statistical association is clear: tooth decay and infected gums are associated with higher rates of heart disease and all ...
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Four startup reactors hit criticality by July 4 to beat a Trump deadline — but the milestone that actually matters is the one the press releases quietly skipped

Four experimental nuclear reactors have started self-sustaining chain reactions on U.S. soil in a single month, clearing a symbolic July 4 deadline set by the Trump administration and, backers say, ...
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The Apollo astronauts left mirrors on the Moon, and every night since, observatories have been bouncing lasers off them to measure the exact distance, which is why we know the ...

One of the quietest Apollo experiments is still doing science without a battery, a radio, or a moving part. It is not a telescope on the Moon. It is not a buried instrument or a forgotten antenna. It ...
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An 86-year-old Pennsylvania farmer rejected roughly $15.7 million — $60,000 per acre — from data-centre developers for his 261 acres. Instead, he accepted $1.9 million for ...

A Pennsylvania farm landscape near Hughesville. This representative photograph does not show Mervin Raudabaugh's two Cumberland County properties. Photo by Phil Evenden via Pexels. An 86-year-old ...
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Namibia's capital has been drinking its own sewage since 1968, when eight years of pilot work produced a system whose current plant pushes 21,000 cubic meters a day through a ...

Namibia is one of the driest countries in Africa, and its capital sits far from any river that runs all year. According to Veolia, one of the companies that helps run the plant, the region gets around ...
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The International Space Station loses about 100 meters of altitude a day and must be shoved back up by a docked Russian thruster roughly once a month to keep from falling

The International Space Station is falling. Right now, as you read this, the massive laboratory is losing altitude every day, sinking through the thin residual atmosphere at the top of Earth’s sky ...
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Earth’s atmosphere does not end where space begins—it stretches beyond the Moon, meaning lunar astronauts were technically still inside it

Space does not begin at a clean edge where Earth’s air abruptly stops. The atmosphere thins continuously, molecule by molecule, until its outermost hydrogen becomes almost indistinguishable from the ...
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Beneath kilometres of Antarctic ice sits a lake the size of a small sea, sealed off from the sky for millions of years and possibly still holding life

Lake Vostok is one of the strangest lakes on Earth because, for most purposes, Earth has hidden it from itself. It lies under the central East Antarctic Ice Sheet, near Russia’s Vostok Station, ...
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Sharks have existed for roughly 450 million years, and for the first 60 million of them, there wasn't a single tree anywhere on the planet — just mosses and liverworts a few ...

Sharks were already ancient by the time the first tree worked out how to stand up. The evidence for their head start is spectacularly unglamorous. A scattering of tiny scales, pulled from Late ...
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In September 1928, Alexander Fleming returned from holiday to find a mold-contaminated Staphylococcus plate with a clear bacteria-free halo — the chance observation that ...

On September 3, 1928, Alexander Fleming returned from holiday to his laboratory at St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, London, and began sorting through plates of Staphylococcus. On one dish, a mold ...
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The Hawthorne effect is named after a pattern in 1920s factory lighting data that nobody checked against the records for eighty years — when two economists finally found the ...

The Hawthorne effect is one of the most cited findings in social science, and for most of its life nobody went back to look at the numbers it was built on. The story is familiar from psychology ...
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More than 10 million years ago, South America had saber-toothed mammals, terror birds and giant snakes. But fossil evidence suggests even its apex land predators could become ...

A full-size reconstruction of the extinct giant caiman genus Purussaurus, displayed alongside visitors. Source. Photo: JosiasZ/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Four shallow pits in a broken bird leg ...