For decades, the United States, Russia, and China have competed for influence around the world. They have fought through economic pressure, cyberattacks, intelligence...
Would you drink water that was extracted from the Moon? With NASA’s recent discovery of water on the Moon’s surface, it might become a more common practice...
We visit a lot of planets here on WHAT IF, but K2-141b is the most extreme one yet. Are you ready to jump on board this one-way space shuttle? If you’d rather stay...
A raging wildfire has broken out in the nearby forest. Endless billows of smoke are blackening the sky. But you notice something strange happening. The clouds of smoke...
Right now, a wall of ice nearly two miles thick is covering the land where Chicago used to be. And it has been moving across the continent for 20,000 years without ever...
If you had a device designed to freeze time for everything but you, life wouldn’t be anything like what you’d expect. You wouldn’t catch up on sleep...
Flesh-eating bacteria? Uh oh … you may want to have a seat. This is going to be a doozy. It turns out that you’ve got a problem. You’ve become a walking buffet for an...
Deep beneath the ocean surface, where sunlight disappears and strange creatures rule the darkness, a creature exists that looks like something from a legend. Its...
When people imagine dangerous snakes, they usually picture dense jungles or scorching deserts. But some of the world’s most venomous snakes spend their entire...
Imagine receiving a message from another world. Not from a distant galaxy millions of light years away, but from a planet orbiting the nearest star system to our own. A...
Death remains one of humanity’s greatest mysteries. For centuries, people have wondered what happens in the final moments of life. Some survivors of near death...
Earth is perfectly balanced in space. It travels around the Sun on an elliptical path that gives us seasons without getting too close to our star. The Sun is 330,000...
