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Explanation: If you could stand on Titan -- what would you see? The featured color view from Titan gazes across an unfamiliar and distant landscape on Saturn's largest moon. The scene was recorded by ESA's Huygens probe in 2005 after a 2.5-hour descent through a thick atmosphere of nitrogen laced with methane. Bathed in an eerie orange light at ground level, rocks strewn about the scene could well be composed of water and hydrocarbons frozen solid at an inhospitable temperature of negative 179 degrees C. The large light-toned rock below and left of center is only about 15 centimeters across...

If that snowstorm felt unusual for this time of the year, it was. Saturday was the snowiest November day ever recorded in Chicago, according to the National Weather Service. The storm dumped over 8 inches of snow on parts of the city. O’Hare International Airport got 8.4 inches as of Sunday morning, and Midway had 6 inches, forecasters said. But the storm isn’t over yet. The area’s winter weather advisory was extended from 6 a.m. to noon Sunday. “A band of snowfall is moving across Chicago, bringing a quick coating of snow again,” Weather Service meteorologist Zachary Yak said. “We...

Explanation: Yes, but can your sunset do this? Looking west from Tucson, Arizona, USA one day last month, the sunset sky looked strange when it briefly lit up with the plume of a rocket launched from California a few minutes earlier. Appearing at times like a giant space fish, the impressive rocket launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base near Lompoc, California, was so noticeable because it was backlit by the setting Sun. The Falcon 9 rocket successfully delivered to low Earth orbit 28 Starlink communications satellites. The plume from the first stage is seen on the right, while the soaring...

A series of important new discoveries have been revealed in Southeast Turkiye, announced to the world this week marking the 5th anniversary of the Taş Tepeler project. As well as revealing new structures, carvings and T-pillars at the sites in this video, stunning artefacts and statues from Göbekli Tepe, Karahan Tepe, Sefer Tepe, Sayburç and Gürcütepe have been placed on display at Karahan Tepe's visitors centre all dating back to over 11,000 years old. Major Discoveries at Göbekli Tepe, Karahan Tepe, Sefer Tepe & Sayburç | Taş Tepeler | 17:09 MegalithomaniaUK | 243K subscribers | 38,014 views | November 29,...

Explanation: This is not a screen from a video game. Nestled below the treeline, the small mountain church does look like it might be hiding from Moon though. In the well-composed telephoto snapshot, taken on November 23, the church walls are partly reflecting light from terrestrial flood lights. Of course, the Moon is reflecting light from the Sun. At any given time the Sun illuminates fully half of the Moon's surface, also known as the lunar dayside, but on that night only a sliver of its sunlit surface was visible. About three days after New Moon, the Moon was in...

Explanation: Is there a monster in IC 1396? Known to some as the Elephant's Trunk Nebula, parts of gas and dust clouds of this star formation region may appear to take on foreboding forms, some nearly human. The only real monster here, however, is a bright young star too far from Earth to hurt us. Energetic light from this star is eating away the dust of the dark cometary globule near the top of the featured image. Jets and winds of particles emitted from this star are also pushing away ambient gas and dust. Nearly 3,000 light-years distant, the relatively...

A tour of the Mycenaean fortress and palace at Tiryns. The Megalithic Walls of Tiryns | 8:34 Scenic Routes to the Past | 48.3K subscribers | 4,722 views | November 28, 2025 0:00 Introduction 1:01 Lower Citadel 1:42 Walls 2:39 Upper Citadel 3:22 Galleries 3:54 Palace 6:35 Postern Gate

Vlad the Impaler - Feeding the Real Dracula - Pheasant with Cherry Sauce | 23:47 Tasting History with Max Miller | 4.07M subscribers | 624,726 views | October 28, 2025

Russia’s Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan was damaged on Thursday following the launch of a manned Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station, the Roscosmos space agency said. The Soyuz MS-28, which was carrying Russian cosmonauts Sergei Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev, along with NASA astronaut Chris Williams, took off from Baikonur at 12:27 Moscow time and successfully docked with the ISS later in the day. “Damage to several elements of the launch pad was detected,” Roscosmos said hours after the crew arrived at the ISS. “An assessment of the condition of the launch complex is currently underway.” The space agency said...

For some scientists, there’s no place more romantic than a cheese cave. When Tufts University biologist Benjamin Wolfe, then a biology postdoc, shepherded his colleague Rachel to a surprise rendezvous with her boyfriend in a Vermont cheese cave, a marriage proposal ensued. And, according to Wolfe and his colleagues’ new paper in Current Biology, so did a discovery about evolution. Some cheese varieties are ripened in caves where they attract microbes—yeast, bacteria, and fungi (molds)—which form a rind on the cheese surface. Molds like Penicillium (the same genus that produces the human antibiotic, but a different species) spur the ripening...

Despite oodles of data on dog domestication, the exact origins of our feline friends have long remained fuzzy. We do know that pet cats retained many of their wild cat ancestors’ characteristics. This—perhaps not surprising many cat caretakers—makes pet cats technically “semidomesticated.” But scientists have squabbled over precisely where and when such changes came about. The feline timeline is especially tricky to pinpoint due to scarce archeological findings, along with the fact that the bones of wild cats and domesticated ones look quite similar. So far, researchers have encountered tantalizing clues, including depictions of cats as beloved, jewelry-wearing family members...

Ozempic medicine prescription with shot sitting on top of the box and measuring tape wrapped around the box Novo Nordisk’s headquarters is in Bagsværd, Denmark, which is where the company announced the failed Alzheimer’s trial for semaglutide. Credit: mikeledray / Shutterstock Novo Nordisk, the Danish drugmaker behind weight‑loss and diabetes giants like Ozempic and Rybelsus, announced on November 24 that its much‑anticipated Alzheimer’s trials failed to slow cognitive decline – a major blow to hopes that its GLP‑1 drugs could break into neurodegenerative disease treatment. Two large trials, one disappointing outcome The EVOKE and EVOKE+ Phase III trials, which enrolled...

Explanation: NGC 6888, also known as the Crescent Nebula, is a about 25 light-years across, a cosmic bubble blown by winds from its central, massive star. This deep telescopic image includes narrowband image data, to isolate light from hydrogen and oxygen atoms. The oxygen atoms produce the blue-green hue that seems to enshroud the nebula's detailed folds and filaments. Visible within the nebula, NGC 6888's central star is classified as a Wolf-Rayet star (WR 136). The star is shedding its outer envelope in a strong stellar wind, ejecting the equivalent of the Sun's mass every 10,000 years. In fact, the...

A volcano more powerful than Tambora... but no one knows where it is. Dive into a real-life scientific thriller to uncover the eruption that changed the world -- and vanished without a trace. The Lost Supervolcano: Was This the Biggest Eruption in Human History? - Full Documentary | 52:52 Easy Documentary Knowledge | 5.99K subscribers | 274,031 views | April 25, 2025

Explanation: The tree is not in danger. That's because the comet pictured just above it, Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon), is far in the distance, well away from the Earth. Comet Lemmon now continues to brighten as it arcs through the inner Solar System, even though it has passed its nearest to the Sun -- because it is now approaching the Earth. The comet will likely appear brightest when it is at its closest to the Earth next week, then closing to about half the Earth-Sun distance. Comet Lemmon may then be visible to the unaided eye, but it is more...

An incredible image captures the bizarre UFO–like ring floating above Possagno, a tiny town in the foothills of the Italian Alps. The photograph was taken by photographer Valter Binotto, who watched as the glowing structure flashed in the sky at 10:45 local time on November 17. A photographer has captured a baffling image of a red UFO–like halo floating over the small Italian town of Possagno This ring is likely a structure known as an 'emission of light and very low–frequency perturbations due to electromagnetic pulse sources', or ELVEs for short. These are rings of red or green light created...

Once upon a time, cholesterol was simple. This molecule, it was proclaimed, came in two varieties: an artery-clogging “bad” sort and an artery-clearing “good” one. The difference was not in the cholesterol molecules themselves, but rather in the way they are packaged up for transport in the bloodstream as nanoparticles called low-density lipoproteins (LDLs) and high-density lipoproteins (HDLs). The public-health message was clear: minimise the bad LDL-cholesterol by cutting down on fatty foods, red meat and dairy products. Increase the good HDL type by doing more exercise and eating more fruits and vegetables. Since a third of heart attacks and...

Explanation: Big, beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 1055 is a dominant member of a small galaxy group a mere 60 million light-years away toward the aquatically intimidating constellation Cetus. Seen edge-on, the island universe spans over 100,000 light-years, a little larger than our own Milky Way galaxy. The colorful, spiky stars decorating this cosmic portrait of NGC 1055 are in the foreground, well within the Milky Way. But telltale pinkish star forming regions and young blue star clusters are scattered through winding dust lanes along the distant galaxy's thin disk. With a smattering of even more distant background galaxies, the deep...

Explanation: How much of Jupiter's moon Europa is made of water? No one is sure, but probably a lot. Based on the Galileo probe data acquired during its exploration of the Jovian system from 1995 to 2003, Europa possesses a deep, global ocean of liquid water beneath a layer of surface ice. The subsurface ocean plus ice layer could descend over 100 kilometers in average depth. Adopting a high-end estimate of 100 kilometers depth, if all the water on Europa were gathered into a ball, it would have a radius of over 800 kilometers. To scale, this intriguing illustration compares...

One of the biggest mysteries surrounding Easter Island may finally be solved - as scientists pinpoint who built the iconic stone heads over 900 years ago. In the past, researchers assumed that the 12 to 80-ton statues would have required the combined efforts of hundreds of labourers to build and move. However, new archaeological evidence shows that the statues, known as moai, were not carved by a single powerful chiefdom. Instead, each moai was carved by a small clan or by an individual family, with as few as four to six people working on a single statue. Using a new...