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Page 58

Q1512

WonderScience

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry honoured metal-organic frameworks — crystals so full of tiny pores that a spoonful can hold the surface area of a football field, enough to pull drinking water straight from desert air.

Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar Yaghi were recognised for building MOFs, lattices of metal nodes linked by carbon struts that leave vast open space inside. Because that space can trap chosen molecules, MOFs are being developed to harvest water in deserts, capture carbon dioxide, and store gases — architecture at the scale of atoms.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025Read card

Q1513

WonderScience

In 2025 researchers recovered proteins from the tooth enamel of a rhino relative that lived up to 24 million years ago — shattering the old limit for how far back such molecules survive.

The enamel came from a fossil in Canada's High Arctic, where deep cold preserved the fragile molecules. Proteins had previously been read back only about 3.5 million years, and DNA only around 2 million. Because enamel is the hardest tissue in the body, it may become a time machine for studying creatures long past the reach of ancient DNA.

Nature (2025)Read card

Q1514

WonderHistory

A massive fossil skull nicknamed 'Dragon Man,' hidden in a Chinese well for decades, was identified in 2025 as a Denisovan — finally giving a face to a human cousin known mostly from DNA.

The Harbin skull, about 146,000 years old, had puzzled scientists since it resurfaced. In 2025, ancient proteins and DNA recovered from it linked it to the Denisovans, a group first identified in 2010 from a finger bone in Siberia. For years Denisovans were a genome without a face; now one of the best-preserved skulls of an archaic human has a name.

Science / Cell (2025)Read card

Q1515

WonderHistory

In 2025 archaeologists opened the tomb of Te K'ab Chaak, the founder-king of Caracol in Belize, untouched for about 1,700 years and holding a mosaic death mask of jade.

Te K'ab Chaak took the throne around AD 331 and began a dynasty that ruled the great Maya city for nearly five centuries. His burial held jade ear-flares, pottery and the jade-and-shell mask; some grave goods hint at contact with distant Teotihuacan in Mexico. It is the first identifiable ruler's tomb found at Caracol in more than forty years of digging.

University of Houston / Caracol Archaeological ProjectRead card

Q1516

WonderHistory

Divers exploring off Egypt in 2025 mapped a sunken port at Taposiris Magna — polished floors, columns and anchors from the age of Cleopatra, now resting under the Mediterranean.

Taposiris Magna, west of Alexandria, is a temple town long searched for clues to Cleopatra VII. The underwater survey revealed harbour structures that show it was a serious maritime hub, adding context to the long-running search around this coast — though Cleopatra's tomb has never been found.

Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and AntiquitiesRead card

Q1517

WonderHistory

In 2025 Egypt announced the tomb of pharaoh Thutmose II — the first royal tomb discovered near the Valley of the Kings since Tutankhamun's in 1922.

Thutmose II reigned in the 18th Dynasty, around 1493–1479 BC, and was husband and half-brother to the famous Hatshepsut. A British–Egyptian team found the tomb with its painted blue ceiling of yellow stars and fragments of inscription. More than a century after Howard Carter's discovery, it is a reminder that the Egyptian desert still keeps royal secrets.

Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and AntiquitiesRead card

Q1518

WonderHistory

Scientists in 2025 read the oldest complete ancient-Egyptian genome yet — from a man buried in a clay pot about 4,500 years ago, near the dawn of the pyramid age.

His remains came from Nuwayrat in Egypt, and the sealed pottery burial helped his DNA survive the heat. The genome showed roughly 80% North African ancestry and about 20% from the region of ancient Mesopotamia — molecular evidence of the long-suspected links between the Nile and the cradle of cities to its east.

Nature (2025)Read card

Q1519

WonderHealth

In 2025 a man lived for a record 271 days with a gene-edited pig kidney — the longest anyone has yet been kept alive by an organ from another species.

Tim Andrews received the kidney in early 2025; it filtered his blood for about nine months before being removed. Researchers edit the pig's genes to switch off the traits that make the human body reject the organ. With human donors far too few, animal organs — xenotransplants — are moving from experiment towards carefully watched clinical trials.

Massachusetts General Hospital (2025)Read card

Q1520

WonderScience

In 2025 a fresh study argued that Nanotyrannus — long dismissed as a young Tyrannosaurus rex — was a separate, smaller predator all along.

The evidence came from a Montana skeleton in the famous 'Dueling Dinosaurs' fossil. Its growth rings showed an animal that had stopped growing at about twenty years old, not a still-growing juvenile, and it carried more teeth and longer arms than T. rex. If it holds up, some 'teenage T. rex' fossils in museums may belong to a different dinosaur entirely.

Nature (2025)Read card

Q1521

WonderSpace

In 2025 the James Webb telescope detected gases over the planet K2-18b that, on Earth, are made mostly by living things — a tantalising hint that scientists quickly cautioned is not proof.

K2-18b lies about 124 light-years away. Webb's instruments picked up possible traces of dimethyl sulfide, a gas produced on Earth by ocean algae. Within days other researchers questioned how firm the signal was, and non-living chemistry could also explain it. It is a vivid example of how the search for life abroad advances: not by a single headline, but by claim and careful challenge.

University of Cambridge / JWST (2025)Read card

Q1522

WonderScience

Weather officials confirmed in 2025 that a single 'megaflash' of lightning stretched about 829 km across the United States — roughly the distance from Dallas to Kansas City, in one flash.

The bolt crossed the southern US skies and was certified as the longest lightning flash on record, beating a 709 km event over South America. Megaflashes crawl horizontally through vast, connected storm systems rather than striking straight down. Satellite lightning mappers now let scientists measure these giants that ground observers could never trace end to end.

World Meteorological Organization (2025)Read card

Q1523

WonderScience

In 2025 geologists confirmed that rocks in northern Canada are about 4.16 billion years old — the oldest intact pieces of Earth's crust ever found.

The rocks belong to the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt on the shore of Hudson Bay, and settle a long argument about their age. They date to the Hadean, Earth's fiery first chapter, not long after the planet formed 4.5 billion years ago. To touch one is to touch a surviving fragment of the infant Earth, older than almost anything else on the surface.

Science (2025)Read card

Q1524

WonderSpace

In 2025 gravitational-wave detectors caught the most massive black-hole collision ever recorded — two giants merging into one about 225 times the mass of the Sun.

The signal, named GW231123, came from two black holes each over 100 solar masses — a size range theory struggles to explain by ordinary star death. Their merger sent ripples through spacetime itself, faint tremors that reached detectors on Earth. Each such catch tests how the universe builds its heaviest objects.

LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA (2025)Read card

Q1525

WonderSpace

In 2025 astronomers found one of the oldest black holes yet — 38 million times the Sun's mass, already grown when the universe was under 500 million years old.

Catalogued as CAPERS-LRD-z9 and spotted with the James Webb telescope, its light has travelled more than 13 billion years to reach us. Finding something so heavy so early is a genuine puzzle: black holes were not supposed to have time to bulk up that fast. It is one of the clues pushing astronomers to rethink how the first giants formed.

University of Texas / JWST (2025)Read card

Q1526

WonderHistory

Research in 2025 identified the oldest known mummies — bodies in Southeast Asia and southern China preserved over 10,000 years ago by being smoke-dried over slow fires.

These are far older than Egypt's Old Kingdom embalmed bodies, around 4,500 years old, and older than South America's Chinchorro mummies. Traces of heat and soot on the bones point to deliberate smoking, a way of keeping the dead close among ancient hunter-gatherer communities. It stretches the human impulse to preserve our dead back into the deep past.

PNAS (2025)Read card

Q1527

WonderScience

In 2025 scientists recovered the oldest RNA yet recorded from a woolly mammoth frozen about 40,000 years ago.

DNA is a creature's instruction book; RNA is a snapshot of which instructions were actually being used when it died. Reading it from a juvenile Siberian mammoth showed which genes were switched on in its muscles, and even hinted at stress in its final hours. RNA is far more delicate than DNA, so many had assumed it could never survive tens of thousands of years.

Cell (2025)Read card

Q1528

WonderNature

In 2025 a drone survey revealed the largest known nesting gathering of giant South American river turtles — more than 41,000 of them massing on a single stretch of riverbank.

The count came from the Guaporé River on the Brazil–Bolivia border, where the turtles haul out together to lay eggs. Counting nesting animals from the air, frame by frame, gives far better numbers than people on the ground and without disturbing the herd. Knowing the true size of such gatherings is the first step to protecting them from poaching and river change.

Wildlife Conservation Society (2025)Read card

Q1529

WonderOcean

When a giant iceberg broke away from Antarctica in 2025, scientists rushed in and filmed a thriving world of life on the seafloor that had been sealed under ice for centuries.

The iceberg, called A-84, calved from the George VI Ice Shelf in January 2025 and exposed seabed no human had seen. A research team reached it and found corals, sponges, icefish and a ghostly phantom jellyfish living in the cold dark. It was a rare chance to glimpse an ecosystem that had survived, unwatched, beneath the frozen lid of the continent.

Schmidt Ocean Institute (2025)Read card

Q1530

WonderNature

In 2025 researchers showed that lions have two distinct kinds of roar, and trained a computer to recognise them — and individual lions — with over 95% accuracy.

By feeding recordings into a machine-learning model, the team could pick out a full-throated roar from a shorter intermediary one, and even identify who was calling. A lion's roar can carry for kilometres, so listening posts could count and track prides without traps or tags. It is quieter, cheaper conservation — done by ear.

Bioacoustics research (2025)Read card

Q1531

WonderHistory

In 2025 researchers proposed that the mysterious 'Band of Holes' in Peru — around 5,000 pits dug in a line up a hillside — was an ancient marketplace and accounting system.

The pits at Monte Sierpe stretch for over a kilometre and have puzzled people for a century. Soil samples turned up traces of crop plants, and the layout echoes the knotted-string khipu records of the Andes. The idea is that traders laid out goods pit by pit, turning a hillside into a ledger you could walk through.

Antiquity (2025)Read card

Q1532

WonderTechnology

In 2025 scientists used artificial intelligence to design the genomes of working viruses that attack bacteria — the first time AI had written a complete viral genome that then functioned in the lab.

The targets were bacteriophages — harmless-to-humans viruses that infect bacteria. An AI model trained on natural genomes proposed new ones; in the lab, 16 of these designs assembled into phages that could kill their bacterial hosts. It is an early, carefully bounded step towards designing biology, and it arrives with real questions about how such power should be governed.

Arc Institute / Stanford (2025)Read card

Q1533

WonderSpace

In March 2025 astronomers confirmed 128 new moons around Saturn in one announcement, lifting its total to 274 — more than all the other planets' moons put together.

A team using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope stacked many images to reveal faint specks orbiting the planet. Most of the new moons are tiny, kilometre-scale chunks, probably shards from larger moons shattered by old collisions. Saturn had already overtaken Jupiter as the Solar System's 'moon king,' and this widened its lead dramatically.

International Astronomical Union (2025)Read card

Q1534

WonderOcean

For the first time, in 2025, scientists recorded a shark actively making sound — a small rig shark producing sharp clicks when handled.

Sharks were long thought to be silent, lacking the swim bladders many noisy fish use. Researchers in New Zealand caught the clicks on tape, likely made by the shark snapping its flat, plate-like teeth together. What the clicks are for is still unknown — perhaps a startle response — but they overturn the idea that sharks move through the sea without a voice.

Royal Society Open Science (2025)Read card

Q1535

WonderScience

In 2025 a company announced pups engineered to resemble the extinct dire wolf, made by editing 20 spots in the genome of an ordinary grey wolf.

Working from DNA in a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull, the team tweaked grey-wolf embryos to bring back dire-wolf traits like size and a pale coat, producing pups named Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi. Scientists were quick to note these are edited grey wolves, not true dire wolves brought back to life. Still, it is a striking test of how far gene editing can reach into the past.

Colossal Biosciences (2025)Read card