An archaeologist's passing guess: Arthur's sword in the stone may echo Bronze Age chiefs lifting freshly cast swords out of stone moulds.
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Two cable sensors sat on the seafloor when the 2003 Tokachi-oki quake hit. Their records showed the ocean shaking like jelly and sending sound into the seabed.
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Saturn's moon Enceladus sits at −180 °C, yet it throws out grains formed in 90 °C water. An astrophysicist explains why it ranks second only to Earth for life.
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Some neurons fire for one cartoon and ignore all others. A neurobiologist explains how the brain builds a Simpsons cell from contrast and colour, and what we still can't explain.
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A supernova hides the core of a dying star for up to 100 days. A rare gamma-ray burst pierces the shell and shows the black hole forming in seconds.
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The biggest wave ever recorded was 524 metres high and began as a landslide in a narrow Alaskan bay. Oceanologist Mikhail Nosov on Lituya Bay.
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A buyer in Ur sent Ea-Nasir a clay tablet demanding his money back for bad copper. An archaeologist's guess: it was a skirmish in a Bronze Age trade war.
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Farmers pour 10 million tonnes of fungicide a year on fields. Mycologist Mikhail Vishnevsky says the fungi that survive fly in through hospital windows.
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Fungi that eat plastic are real. A mycologist explains why the people who found one got scared, and what a loose strain could do to a civilisation built on plastic.
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