Major funding for NOVA Wonders is provided by the National Science Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and public television viewers, with additional ...

Arctic Passage homepage At first glance and out of context, the amount and variety of food brought on the Erebus and Terror, the two ships of Sir John Franklin's expedition, seems impressive (see list ...

Color photos, old newspapers, the Declaration—we've all seen materials damaged by long-term exposure to light. But what's actually happening? The Declaration of Independence took a lot of abuse in the ...

Sir Isaac Newton once wrote, in what must be one of the most oft-quoted lines in the history of science, "If I have seen further it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants." Well, any of us who ...

The story behind the centuries-long decipherment of ancient Maya hieroglyphs.

Across the Arabian Desert lie colossal, enigmatic structures, some stretching for miles, visible only from the sky. Rediscovered a century ago and once believed to be defensive or ritualistic in ...

Receive emails about upcoming NOVA programs and related content, as well as featured reporting about current events through a science lens. The invention that set the stage for the telescope was the ...

Every age develops its stories or metaphors for how the universe was conceived and structured. According to an ancient Indian creation myth, the universe was created when the gods dismembered the ...

Once you’ve seen a slime mold—its gooey, delicately branching structure oozing in a vaguely unsettling way along a log or leaf—you’re unlikely to forget it. They’re unmistakable because there’s ...

Think of something that scares you. Your heart starts to pound, you break into a sweat, your muscles start to tense. This classic fear response is important so that you can take action - “fight or ...

An electrical engineer works on Form Energy's 2022 battery module in the company's lab in Berkeley, California. Image courtesy of Form Energy Share Weirton, West Virginia has iron in its blood. The ...

Ask a materials scientist to choose the strongest material, and you are likely to get a question instead of an answer. What kind of strong? Tensile strength? Toughness? Yield strength? Hardness? When ...