Science

An artist’s impression of the Tunguska airburst over central Siberia on 30 June 1908. An explosion powerful enough to destroy millions of trees should have left behind a giant crater. Instead, when scientists finally reached the remote Siberian wilderness where the blast had occurred, they found only a forest laid out like matchsticks. There was … Read more

For decades, palaeontologists have puzzled over a scene preserved in rock across parts of Mongolia and China. Fossilised oviraptor dinosaurs were repeatedly found sitting over nests in a posture that looked strikingly familiar. Their forelimbs spread across the clutch, their bodies positioned above the eggs, almost as if they were brooding like modern birds.The image … Read more

The question of whether humanity is alone in the universe has fascinated scientists for generations, but few have pursued an answer as publicly or as controversially as Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb. While most researchers argue that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, Loeb believes advanced alien civilisations may already have left technological traces in our cosmic … Read more

Quote of the day by Alexander Graham Bell (AI-generated image) Today’s quote of the day is widely quoted as having been said by Alexander Graham Bell, the Scottish-born inventor best remembered for giving the world the telephone. The line reads, “The only difference between success and failure is the ability to take action.” It has … Read more

Carl Jung (Image: Wikipedia) Think of a person who changed you. Maybe a friend, a teacher, someone you loved, even someone you knew only briefly. Chances are you came away from them a little different than you were before. Carl Jung, one of the most influential figures in the history of psychology, captured this in … Read more

The name Tristan da Cunha tends to sit at the edge of most atlases, almost as an afterthought in the South Atlantic, a small mark of land far from anything that feels busy or connected. Yet its story runs oddly thick for such a remote place. Ships once passed it as part of a long, … Read more

Carl Friedrich Gauss (Image: Wikipedia) For a lot of people, mathematics is the subject they were glad to leave behind at school. Cold, hard, full of rules and one right answer. So it can come as a surprise that one of the greatest minds who ever lived didn’t merely respect mathematics. He crowned it. Mathematics … Read more

For most of scientific history, chemical elements were identified through materials that could be handled, heated, weighed or examined in a laboratory. Helium followed a very different path. It first emerged not from a rock, a gas sample or a chemical experiment, but from a thin yellow line hidden within sunlight.According to a Science Museum … Read more

For decades, discussion about California’s next major earthquake has tended to revolve around a single fault. The southern stretch of the San Andreas has long been viewed as the state’s most closely watched geological boundary, largely because it has remained quiet since the mid-19th century despite continuing movement beneath the surface. That long silence has … Read more

Far beyond the Milky Way, vast collections of galaxies continue to drift, gather and occasionally collide. One such region has drawn astronomers’ attention for decades. Known as CL0016+1609, this immense galaxy cluster contains hundreds of galaxies bound together by gravity and shines strongly in X-ray light. A newly highlighted image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope … Read more