The universe is weirder than fiction.

The rocks moved. The mystery didn't last.

Thin ice and a little wind can send desert stones travelling.

DAY 34

Meet solid smoke.

An aerogel can be almost entirely empty space.

THE CURIOSITY INDEX

Pick a rabbit hole.

Forty stories. Six corners of science.
Every one comes with a way to check it.

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Search by topic or phrase. Try “space”, “Ontario” or “ice”. Press / to jump here.

40 stories in the collection

01SpaceDAY 01

Diamond rain. No umbrella required.

Lab-made nanodiamonds point to a very strange kind of planetary weather.

02SpaceDAY 07

Earth used to clock out early.

An ancient day may have lasted less than 19 hours.

03SpaceDAY 13

Venus does sunrise backwards.

West is where the day begins on our neighbouring planet.

04SpaceDAY 19

A forecast with a chance of iron.

On one scorching exoplanet, the weather may involve metal.

05SpaceDAY 25

The universe has a very quiet neighbourhood.

Meet the Boötes Void: a vast region with surprisingly few galaxies.

06SpaceDAY 31

A star with serious compression issues.

Neutron stars pack stellar mass into a city-sized remnant.

07SpaceDAY 37

Saturn passes the float test. Sort of.

Its average density is lower than water's. The bathtub is imaginary.

08SpaceDAY 39

Moondust came with a familiar smell.

Apollo crews compared dust inside their cabin to spent gunpowder.

09Living thingsDAY 02

The tiny animals that took on space.

Dried tardigrades survived a journey that would ruin most holidays.

10Living thingsDAY 08

This jellyfish has a reset button.

An adult can return to an earlier life stage. Biology gets a do-over.

11Living thingsDAY 14

More colour receptors. Not a better colour chart.

Mantis shrimp vision is stranger than the internet version.

12Living thingsDAY 20

Frozen frog. Still in the game.

Wood frogs can survive a winter with ice forming inside their bodies.

13Living thingsDAY 26

The rodent that bends the ageing curve.

Naked mole-rat survival records challenge a familiar mortality pattern.

14Living thingsDAY 32

An octopus edits the message.

Temperature changes can alter RNA editing in its nervous system.

15Living thingsDAY 38

A 24,000-year pause. Then life continued.

A rotifer recovered from permafrost revived and reproduced.

16Living thingsDAY 40

A shark with centuries on its side.

Greenland shark ages are extraordinary. So are the error bars.

17Your bodyDAY 03

You are not ten times more bacteria.

A popular body fact needed a recount.

18Your bodyDAY 09

Your space suit needs growing room.

Astronauts can temporarily gain height in weightlessness.

19Your bodyDAY 15

The brain processes pain. Its tissue lacks the sensors.

The distinction is what makes awake brain surgery possible.

20Your bodyDAY 21

Your skeleton came with extra pieces.

Many of the bones you had as a baby fused as you grew.

21Your bodyDAY 27

Pregnancy can leave a cellular souvenir.

Fetal cells can persist in the mother's body for decades.

22Your bodyDAY 33

A trillion smells? Let's inspect that number.

One famous estimate became a lesson in how science checks itself.

23Physics & chemistryDAY 04

Cathedral glass is not slowly melting.

Those uneven panes are not evidence of centuries of flow.

24Physics & chemistryDAY 10

Time is a little different upstairs.

Atomic clocks can detect relativity over a height difference of centimetres.

25Physics & chemistryDAY 16

Negative temperature. Not colder than zero.

A specialised atomic system flips the everyday meaning of hot and cold.

26Physics & chemistryDAY 22

Your ice cube has exotic relatives.

Water can arrange itself into many different crystal structures.

27Physics & chemistryDAY 28

A metal with a surprisingly low melting point.

Gallium melts at about 29.76°C.

DAY 34

Meet solid smoke.

An aerogel can be almost entirely empty space.

29Science historyDAY 05

Curie's notebooks still carry a trace.

Radioactive contamination remains in some historic laboratory notebooks.

30Science historyDAY 11

Newton had an alchemy era.

The famous physicist left an enormous body of alchemical writing.

31Science historyDAY 17

The mystery in Tycho Brahe's remains.

A forensic investigation tested a centuries-old poisoning story.

32Science historyDAY 23

The scientist who swallowed his hypothesis.

Barry Marshall's self-experiment helped challenge ideas about stomach disease.

33Science historyDAY 29

The doctor who became his own experiment.

Werner Forssmann tested cardiac catheterisation on himself in 1929.

34Science historyDAY 35

A very unusual museum exhibit.

Galileo's finger became a scientific relic.

35Earth & natureDAY 06

A forest with a shared identity.

Pando's many aspen trunks are connected as a clonal organism.

36Earth & natureDAY 12

The glacier with a red outflow.

Blood Falls is a story about hidden brine, not a bleeding glacier.

DAY 18

The rocks moved. The mystery didn't last.

Thin ice and a little wind can send desert stones travelling.

38Earth & natureDAY 24

Ontario water with a deep past.

Water from a Timmins mine was dated in billions, not millions, of years.

39Earth & natureDAY 30

When a lake released its hidden gas.

The Lake Nyos disaster revealed a devastating geological hazard.

40Earth & natureDAY 36

A river can help a mountain rise.

Removing rock can let the crust rebound. Everest is part of the story.