For as long as humans have been on Earth, we have looked up at (almost) the same sky and wondered whether the goings-on up above might mirror the events happening down below. Scientists on the OGLE project - an astronomical endeavour started by the University of Warsaw in 1992 – noticed that the brightness of certain stars fluctuated rhythmically over time. When they plotted the light output of these stars on a graph, they noticed how much they resembled heartbeats on an electrocardiogram. We now know that this starlight ‘heartbeat’ comes from pairs of stars orbiting one another, with the distance between them changing drastically as they complete an orbit. When the stars are far apart, they possess a spherical shape. When the partner stars are close together, gravity causes them to stretch and adopt ellipsoidal shapes, changing their brightness as seen from lightyears away. Since the OGLE project was first started, dozens more heartbeat stars have been discovered by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope which was launched in 2009.

When Dr. Václav Kuna and Prof. John Nábělek of Oregon State University discovered that the songs of fin whales could be used to image the Earth’s crust, they united the wonderful worlds of geophysics and marine biology. Their discovery, published in the journal Science in February of 2021, was a serendipitous one. Kuna and Nábělek started their research monitoring earthquakes along the Blanco transform fault, about 100 kilometres off Oregon’s western coast. They strategically placed a network of 54 seismometers on the ocean floor, allowing them to collect seismic readings for one year. In addition to 8,000 small earthquakes, the team also detected strange sound waves they didn’t recognise right away. Kuna figured out that these waves were the echoing calls of fin whales: short, low-frequency chirps that repeat every 7-40 seconds, forming songs that can last for up to 10 hours.

Reading the word “fungi,” you probably envision mushrooms. Maybe the buttery porcini in a risotto you paid way too much for on a blind date from hell. Perhaps the poisonous Amanita muscaria that has somehow been immortalized as furniture for garden gnomes. In reality, mushrooms are only the cute, familiar tips of the fungal iceberg. Most of a fungus’ body lies underground, connecting with other fungi to form a network of branched threads called a mycelium. Since the late 1800s, scientists have known that plants are able to associate with the mycelium to form the mycorrhiza – from the Greek mykēs, “mushroom” and rhiza, “root” – but only over the past half century have they begun to uncover its complexity. Incredibly, different plant species connect to one another using the mycorrhiza, exchanging resources underground much like remote computers access the internet to exchange information.

Forty-four years ago, NASA launched the twin probes Voyager 1 and 2 into space. With no return mission planned, the two spacecraft will continue journeying for as long as their generators will allow, transmitting data back to Earth along the way. Voyager 1 allowed astronomers to study Jupiter and Saturn before crossing the heliopause in 2012. Now, the most distant human-made object – a whopping 14 billion miles from Earth – has detected the faint, constant “hum” of deep space.

For decades, we’ve known that migratory birds use the Earth’s magnetic field to find their way but haven’t found any evidence pointing to how it could possibly work. Considering that these birds navigate using a relatively weak magnetic field and still manage to cover great distances while flying alone, the whole process seems like magic. And like most things deemed ‘magical,’ this phenomenon remained shrouded in mystery until a theory was put forward. Scientists in the late 1970s noticed that the magnetic orientation of birds was light-dependent. They proposed that a light-sensitive molecule – known as a photoreceptor – inside birds’ eyes may be the magnetic detector they were looking for, and that this molecule is the site of chemical reactions that can be affected by a weak magnetic field.