Reality Is Strange

Twenty-five centimeters above a rainforest floor, a carpenter ant bites into a leaf—and never lets go. A parasitic fungus has driven it to a precise location to die. But when scientists reconstructed infected ants in...

On August 6, 1945, Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Three days later, he survived Nagasaki. Burned, injured, and exposed to two nuclear explosions, he went on to live until the age of...

On January 1, 1995, a laser beneath a North Sea platform measured a wave 25.6 meters tall — roughly the height of an eight-storey building. For centuries, sailors had reported isolated walls of water far larger than the...

In June 2019, NASA's Curiosity rover measured the highest concentration of methane it had ever detected on Mars. Days later, it was gone. Curiosity has been finding traces of methane in Gale Crater for more than a...

In 1993, a listening system on the floor of the North Pacific recorded a whale calling at 51.75 hertz — a voice unlike any known whale in the region. For more than a decade, researchers followed that voice across...

In 2000, miners 300 meters beneath the Mexican desert broke into a chamber filled with translucent crystals more than 11 meters long. The Cave of the Crystals at Naica contains some of the largest natural crystals ever...

A single bubble, suspended in water by sound, can flash tens of thousands of times per second. The phenomenon is called sonoluminescence: an acoustic wave makes a microscopic bubble expand, collapse and emit a pulse of...

In Antarctica, an instrument sensitive enough to detect changes in gravity smaller than one part in a billion found something that should not have been there: the Earth was vibrating on days when no major earthquake had...

In 1978, a botanist marked a series of bare circles in the Namib Desert. Thirty-eight years later, many were still there. Namibia’s fairy circles form one of the most regular vegetation patterns known in any dryland on...

In 1970, scientists drilling beneath the Mediterranean found something that should not have been there: salt formed under conditions more like a desert than a deep sea. Around six million years ago, the Mediterranean...

In 2004, European robins inside a small wooden hut in Germany suddenly lost their sense of direction. The birds could still navigate normally when researchers blocked the faint electromagnetic noise around them. That...

On July 14, 1518, a woman stepped into a street in Strasbourg and began to dance — and she did not stop. Within weeks, dozens and possibly hundreds of people were caught in the same strange affliction, dancing for hours...

In 1902, a corroded lump of bronze from an ancient shipwreck cracked open — and revealed a tiny gear. What emerged was the Antikythera Mechanism, a hand-built machine more than two thousand years old capable of modeling...

On December 20, 2013, more than sixty rocks moved across a shallow pond in Death Valley while two researchers stood nearby and watched. For decades, stones on Racetrack Playa had left trails hundreds of meters long...

In July 2012, two cameras on a hillside in China accidentally recorded one of the rarest phenomena in atmospheric physics. A glowing ball appeared immediately after a lightning strike, drifted across the ground for 1.64...