In 1999, US space agency NASA launched the Stardust spaceship with what seemed then to be extraordinary aims. The first task of the mission was to take pictures of a comet, before diving into its tail…
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Researchers have developed a method to produce ammonia simply from air and water. Not only is it more energy efficient than the century-old Haber-Bosch process currently in use all over the world, but…
“Lying is a bad thing – this is what mentors, parents and teachers tell us. But there is no society without lies.” So says theoretical physicist Rafael Barrio, and when he and his colleague Kimmo Kaski…
When faced with choosing the shortest queue at a supermarket, what do you do? Nobody starts counting – what our brain does is “number sensing”. The ability to gauge numbers occurs without knowing how to…
Some shares have new owners every second. Today much of the buying and selling is done by computers, but some still rely on human intuition – the gut feeling of the experienced trader. “Nobody can predict…
Once the most numerous bird species in North America, passenger pigeons went from numbering in the billions to being extinct in less than a century. Their decline has been mostly blamed on intensive hunting…
Many ailments, such as irregular heartbeats, can be treated by electrical stimulation within the body. But current technology makes in-body devices, such as pacemakers, very bulky because they need big…
In 1934, two physicists came up with a theory that described how to create matter from pure light. But they dismissed the idea of ever observing such a phenomenon in the laboratory because of the difficulties…
Even though a blue whale is much heavier than a tuna, the mammal consumes less energy per unit weight than the fish when they travel the same distance. For years, these sort of comparisons have dominated…
Given that we are unlikely to be visiting an exoplanet any time soon, astronomers have been contemplating whether it might be possible to detect indications of simple life – a biosignature – from a distance…
Bacterial diseases cause millions of deaths every year. Most of these bacteria were benign at some point in their evolutionary past, and we don’t always understand what turned them into disease-causing…
Earth was still a violent place shortly after life began, with regular impactors arriving from space. For the first time, scientists have modelled the effects of one such violent event – the strike of…
During the February half term break, I took my son to the Hayward gallery to see the new Martin Creed show. The highlight of the exhibition is a space in which 20 people are squeezed into a small room…
Finding liquid water on a celestial body within the solar system is exciting. The only thing that is probably more exciting is finding an ocean full of it. Today such news comes via Cassini, which has…
Zebras’ stripes have baffled biologists since Charles Darwin. Many hypotheses have been proposed regarding their purpose but, despite hundreds of years of study, there remains disagreement. In an attempt…
The worst time to be alive in Earth’s history is unarguably the end-Permian, about 250 million years ago. It is the period when the greatest-ever extinction event recorded took place, killing 97% of all…
A new, planet-like body has been found on the outer edges of the solar system. This object, called 2012VP113, is the second body of its class found since the identification of the dwarf planet Sedna in…
Facebook has just acquired the mobile messenger service WhatsApp for US$19 billion. Launched in 2009 by two former Yahoo employees, in just over four years WhatsApp has grown to 420m monthly users. Why…
The work of the Greek polymath Plato has kept millions of people busy for millennia. A few among them have been mathematicians who have obsessed about Platonic solids, a class of geometric forms that are…
Researchers in the US have overcome a key barrier to making nuclear fusion reactors a reality. In results published in Nature, scientists have shown that they can now produce more energy from fusion reactions…
A series of fossil discoveries in the 1990s changed our understanding of the lives of early birds and mammals, as well as the dinosaurs they shared an ecosystem with. All those discoveries had one thing…
Materials shape human progress – think stone age or bronze age. The 21st century has been referred to as the molecular age, a time when scientists are beginning to manipulate materials at the atomic level…
Developing new drugs is hard and expensive. The lengthy process from initial discovery to the market is some times compared to the difficulty of putting a person on the moon. Despite accusations that the…
Water ice is the most abundant solid material in the universe. Much of it was created as the byproduct of star formation, but not all. John Bradley of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and his team…
Claiming to be a country is an easy task. But to make others accept your claim is a lot harder. Aspiring states need favours from great powers, or sometimes even celebrities, to establish their legitimacy…