Venus, Earth’s closest planetary neighbor, is one of the most extreme and hostile environments in the Solar System. Its surface is scorched by intense heat, blanketed in...
Life on Earth is far more resilient than it first appears. From scorching deserts to freezing oceans, and even places touched by radiation or near total isolation...
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The Blue Flash Was the First Warning, and Within Days His Body Began Losing the Ability to Heal
The accident began with a flash of blue light. For Hisashi Ouchi, a 35 year old worker at a nuclear fuel processing facility in Tokaimura, Japan, that brief glow marked...
A volcano is one of the most unforgiving natural phenomenons on Earth. If you were to fall into its magma-filled center, your body would quickly bubble up, and disappear...
See that strip of stars splashed across the night sky? That’s our home galaxy, the Milky Way. You can see it from Earth because we live on its very outskirts, far...
Hidden deep within the lush forests of northeastern India are bridges unlike any others on Earth. They aren’t built from steel, concrete, or wood. Instead, they...
In a galaxy far away, gravity didn’t quite work the way it does on Earth. And the speed at which everything moved was really weird too. Maybe, some places in our...
The Moon weighs about one eightieth of what Earth does. That is why it can hang there for billions of years, tugging gently at our oceans, doing nothing worse than...
For dinner tonight, you are being treated to the tasting menu of a lifetime. The periodic table of elements. Which elements would you be able to eat? Which ones would...
If you’re watching this right now, you’ve probably used antibiotics at some point in your life. But did you really need to? The Centers for Disease...
Across the planet, some animals repeat journeys so extreme that they make human endurance look insignificant. They cross continents, oceans, and entire hemispheres just...
The king cobra is one of the most dangerous reptiles on Earth. It is the longest venomous snake in the world and can be found across India, South China, and Southeast...
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...
Let’s say you’ve got two bottles of water in front of you. One is a plastic bottle, the other a reusable one. You already know that you should probably pick the reusable...
This star is about to transform into a black hole. And we’re about to travel inside it to see what’s on the other side. The only problem is that we’ll...
If you were to drill straight down into Mars, what would you find? Would the red planet reveal its true colors? Would you finally discover life on Mars? And how...
Human history has been full of battles and wars, some big and some small. But if World War 3 were to happen, it might be humanity’s biggest battle yet. Advanced...
This would be the journey of a lifetime, if you don’t mind riding through molten rock and crushing pressure. What would you see along the way? How long...
An alarm blares across the ship. People start shouting. Then you hear it, gunfire. This is not a movie, and Captain Jack Sparrow is not coming to help you. Somewhere out...
Giles Corey made a good living in Salem after migrating over from England. Corey owned a fairly large portion of land and was widely known for his farming and animal...
