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Explanation: A star forming region cataloged as NGC 2264, this beautiful but complex arrangement of interstellar gas and dust is about 2,700 light-years distant in the faint but fanciful constellation Monoceros, the Unicorn. Seen toward the celestial equator and near the plane of our Milky Way galaxy, the seasonal skyscape mixes reddish emission nebulae excited by energetic light from newborn stars with dark interstellar dust clouds. Where the otherwise obscuring dust clouds lie close to the hot, young stars, they also reflect starlight, forming blue reflection nebulae. In fact, bright variable star S Monocerotis is immersed in a blue-tinted haze...

Explanation: Does the road to our galaxy's center go through Monument Valley? It doesn't have to, but if your road does -- take a picture. In this case, the road is US Route 163 and iconic buttes on the Navajo National Reservation populate the horizon. The band of Milky Way Galaxy stretches down from the sky and appears to be a continuation of the road on Earth. Filaments of dust darken the Milky Way, in contrast to billions of bright stars and several colorful glowing gas clouds including the Lagoon and Trifid nebulas. The featured picture is a composite of...

...for over two millennia, the great civilizations of the Mediterranean... possessed copper in abundance. They had gold, timber, and grain... What they did not have was tin... in the early centuries, tin came from... Central and South Asia, from the Zeravshan Valley in what is now Tajikistan and the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan... By the Late Bronze Age, the kingdoms had turned to the sea... In 1982, a sponge diver off the coast of Grand Cape in Turke... found what came to be known as the Uluburun shipwreck... mostly, it carried metal. There were ten tons of copper, in the...

Diamonds aren't just for jewelry. From their cosmic origins in dying stars to their formation deep within the Earth, these gems possess unique properties that could revolutionize our world. This documentary uncovers the science behind both natural and man-made diamonds, exploring how scientists are creating "super diamonds" that are tougher and more efficient than anything found in nature. Discover how these new diamonds could replace silicon in our electronics, power space exploration, and usher in a new technological age. How This Gem Could Be The Future Of Technology | 45:38 | 284K subscribers | 777,488 views | August 2, 2025

Asteroid 2024 YR4, has sparked concern about its chance of hitting Earth in December 2032. How worried should we be? Scientists Warn Asteroid YR4 May Impact Earth - What We Know So far | 20:22 Dr Ben Miles | 2.17M subscribers | 462,064 views | February 23, 2025 0:00 The Discovery 2024 YR4 0:56 How to Spot an Asteroid 3:07 Ad Read 4:33 Why Are We So Bad at Predicting Asteroid Impacts? 11:42 How Much Damage Could YR4 Do? 13:04 How Could We Stop Asteroid YR4? 16:34 Conclusion

Explanation: What are these little red dots (LRDs)? Nobody knows. Discovered only last year, hundreds of LRDs have now been found by the James Webb Space Telescope in the early universe. Although extremely faint, LRDs are now frequently identified in deep observations made for other purposes. A wide-ranging debate is raging about what LRDs may be and what importance they may have. Possible origin hypotheses include accreting supermassive black holes inside clouds of gas and dust, bursts of star formation in young dust-reddened galaxies, and dark matter powered gas clouds. The highlighted images show six nearly featureless LRDs listed under...

Explanation: What is big, bright, and beautiful, can wear a cape made of clouds, and is at the closest point in its elliptical orbit around planet Earth? A full moon at perigee of course, captured here near moonset in predawn skies on November 5 from Kayseri, Turkiye. Full moons that happen at (or very near) perigee, and so are slightly larger and brighter than full moons on average, have become popularly known as supermoons. In fact, this full moon at perigee is the closest and brightest of the three supermoons of 2025. Rising as the Sun sets, this full moon...

Wayne May tells the story of two 4000 year old Cuneiform Tablets made from the same era found in America. One by Native American Chief Joseph and the other by a woman in Georgia who found it while gardening. Chief Joseph and his 4000 year old tablet | 3:09 Hidden in the Heartland | 5.76K subscribers | 234,927 views | Premiered December 17, 2025

For more than half a century, Americans have been urged to shy away from saturated fats, found mainly in animal products. We have been told to cook with canola oil instead of butter, select skim instead of whole milk, and to fill our plates with pasta instead of steak. Paradoxically, decades of adherence to this advice has coincided with rising levels of chronic disease. As people cut more saturated fat from their diets, the nation grew heavier and sicker — not healthier. Put plainly, the war on saturated fat, rooted in the hypothesis that it causes heart disease, has never...

The identity of Jack the Ripper is the greatest mystery in the history of British crime. Swedish journalist Christer Holmgren has sifted through over 120 years of clues, searching for proof that will reveal the true killer. He believes he's finally found his man, and he's off to London to prove it. The Missing Evidence: Jack the Ripper (Full Episode) | 46:15 Smithsonian Channel | 4.28M subscribers | 2,473,885 views | August 23, 2015

Explanation: What's happening in the sky? Lightning. The most commonly seen type of lightning involves flashes of bright white light between clouds. Over the past 50 years, though, other types of upper-atmospheric lightning have been confirmed, including tentacled red sprites and ringed ELVES. Although both last only a small fraction of a second, sprites are brighter and easier to photograph than their more common electrical-discharge cousins. ELVES are rapidly expanding rings that are thought to be created when an electromagnetic pulse shoots upward from charged clouds and impacts the ionosphere, causing nitrogen molecules to glow. Capturing either form of lightning...

You think you’re being watched by satellites and smartphones—but the real surveillance network is perched on power lines above your head. Scientists recently trained artificial intelligence on thousands of hours of crow vocalizations, expecting meaningless animal noise. Instead, the AI detected structured language, syntax, planning behavior, and something far more disturbing: humans are the primary subject of crow communication. This documentary explores how crows recognize individual human faces, assign identifiers, share reputations across generations, and coordinate warnings through a global avian network. From facial recognition experiments and tool-making intelligence to crow funerals, justice systems, and possible encrypted communication, the evidence...

According to a statement released by the Public Library of Science, a new study of the 2,400-year-old Hjortspring boat, discovered with a cache of weapons in the early twentieth century on Denmark's island of Als, suggests that it may have been constructed in the Baltic Sea region. First, Mikael Fauvelle of Lund University and his colleagues radiocarbon dated cording and caulk found with the boat to the fourth or third century B.C. Then, they used gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to determine that the caulk had likely been made of animal fat and pine pitch. At the time, there were...

Explanation: Spanning light-years, this suggestive shape known as the Seahorse Nebula floats in silhouette against a rich background of stars and glowing hydrogen gas. Seen toward the royal northern constellation of Cepheus, the dusty, dark nebula is part of a Milky Way molecular cloud some 1,200 light-years distant. It is also listed as Barnard 150 (B150), one of 182 dark markings of the sky cataloged in the early 20th century by astronomer E. E. Barnard. Packs of low mass stars are forming within, but their collapsing cores are only visible at long infrared wavelengths. Still, the luminous depths of the...

Archimedes, one of ancient Greece’s most famous and influential physicists and engineers, left a legacy of writings that had been thought to be lost to time. Much of his work only survived through copies and translations by scribes. One of the most famous fragments of Archimedes’ writings was the Palimpsest, a manuscript which by the 12th century a monk had overwritten and repurposed as a book of prayers. To discover the writings of Archimedes in the manuscript, scientists recently used the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center to reveal the iron content of the ink written under the monk’s prayers. The method...

The infamous Black Death -- a pandemic that killed as many as one third to one half of Europeans within just a few years -- may have been aided in its devastation by an unknown volcanic eruption.That's the hypothesis presented in research published December 4 in Communications Earth & Environment, which argues that the eruption triggered several seasons of climate instability and crop failures. That instability, in turn, forced several Italian states to import grain stores from new sources -- specifically, from regions surrounding the Black Sea. Riding along on those grain stores, the researchers posit, were fleas infected with...

Explanation: Yesterday the Sun reached its southernmost point in planet Earth's sky. Called a solstice, many cultures mark yesterday's date as a change of seasons -- from autumn to winter in Earth's Northern Hemisphere and from spring to summer in Earth's Southern Hemisphere. The featured image was taken just before the longest night of the 2025 northern year at Stonehenge in United Kingdom. There, through stones precisely placed 4,500 years ago, a 4.5 billion year old large glowing orb is seen setting. Even given the precession of the Earth's rotational axis over the millennia, the Sun continues to set over...

[snip] We generated a genomic time transect spanning the past 11,000 years and found that cats previously identified as carrying a F. l. lybica mtDNA clade from Neolithic and Chalcolithic southeast Europe and Anatolia, dated between 9500 and 6300 years ago, were F. silvestris wildcats whose ancestors hybridized with F. l. lybica. Ancient genomes revealed an increasing trend of African wildcat ancestry ranging from 9 to 34% eastward, from Bulgaria to central Anatolia.The earliest cat belonging to the genetic cluster of as F. l. lybica and F. catus in Europe originates from the site of Genoni, in Sardinia (Italy), and...

Explanation: Shiny NGC 253 is one of the brightest spiral galaxies visible, and also one of the dustiest. Some call it the Silver Coin Galaxy for its appearance in small telescopes, or just the Sculptor Galaxy for its location within the boundaries of the southern constellation Sculptor. Discovered in 1783 by mathematician and astronomer Caroline Herschel, the dusty island universe lies a mere 10 million light-years away. About 70 thousand light-years across, NGC 253 is the largest member of the Sculptor Group of Galaxies, the nearest to our own Local Group of Galaxies. In addition to its spiral dust lanes,...

Explanation: Can you tell that today is a solstice by the tilt of the Earth? Yes. At a solstice, the Earth's terminator -- the dividing line between night and day -- is tilted the most. The featured time-lapse video demonstrates this by displaying an entire year on planet Earth in twelve seconds. From geosynchronous orbit, the Meteosat 9 satellite recorded infrared images of the Earth every day at the same local time. The video started at the September 2010 equinox with the terminator line being vertical: an equinox. As the Earth revolved around the Sun, the terminator was seen to...