Imagine an animal that began its life centuries before the Roman Empire reached its height and has quietly continued its daily routine ever since. According to recent reports, scientists have identified a giant Caribbean sponge believed to have lived for around 2,300 years, making it one of the oldest animals ever documented. The sponge is … Read more
The mission is considered highly challenging because Swift was never designed to be repaired or physically captured in space. Nasa is preparing an ambitious mission to save one of its ageing space telescopes from falling back to Earth, in what could become the first American attempt to use a robotic spacecraft to rescue and reposition … Read more
Isaac Newton (Image: Wikipedia) We often assume the smartest answer must be the most complicated one. Big words, tangled explanations, layers upon layers of detail. Surely anything that sounds this complex must be deep. Isaac Newton, one of the greatest minds in history, believed almost the opposite. Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, … Read more
Hold a three-pound weight in your hand. It isn’t much. A small bag of flour, maybe a chubby kitten. And yet, according to the physicist Michio Kaku, you’re holding the rough weight of the most complicated thing in our entire solar system. The brain weighs only three pounds, he wrote, yet it is the most … Read more
Hippocrates (Image: Wikipedia) Cut your finger, and within days the skin knits itself back together without a single instruction from you. Catch a mild cold, and your body fights it off while you sleep. We tend to credit medicine for making us well, yet a great deal of healing happens on its own, quietly, inside … Read more
Democritus (Image: Wikipedia) It is one thing to behave well, and quite another to be good. Most of us can manage not to lie, cheat or steal, especially when someone is watching. But the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus pointed to a deeper kind of goodness. Real goodness, he said, is not merely not doing wrong, … Read more
The asteroid that’s set to drift past Earth this weekend is not the kind of object that usually catches public attention, even in astronomical circles where near-Earth flybys are fairly routine. Still, there are moments when the numbers line up in a way that makes people look twice. A rocky body several times taller than … Read more
Freeman Dyson (Image: Wikipedia) Ask an adult what killed their love of a subject, and you’ll often hear the same answer. The exams. Something they once found fascinating got flattened into a syllabus, a set of model answers, and a grade out of a hundred. The physicist Freeman Dyson saw the danger in that, and … Read more
Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS has given astronomers an opportunity they rarely expect to receive. Unlike the countless icy bodies that circle the Sun, this object formed around another star before drifting into our solar system, carrying frozen material that has remained largely unchanged for billions of years. After passing closest to the Sun in late 2025, … Read more
Image: University of Würzburg Getting stuck in sand has ended dreams of exploration before. On Mars, where loose dunes, soft soil and rocky terrain stretch for thousands of kilometres, a trapped rover can mean the loss of years of scientific work and millions in investment. Now, researchers in Germany have turned to an unlikely source … Read more