Category: 7. Science

We live in a very exciting time: answers to some of the oldest questions humanity has conceived are within our grasp. One of these is whether Earth is the only place that harbours life.

In the last 30 years, the question of whether the Sun…

When engineers want to make a metal stronger, one of the most reliable strategies is to use smaller grains – the microscopic crystal regions within the material. But when deformed at extreme speeds, this rule flips and metals with very small…

The closest planet to the Sun is Mercury. It’s a tiny world, even smaller than Saturn’s moon Titan and Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. That’s unusual for a planetary system. Most star systems have a large world between the size of Earth and…

Over the decades, many strains of disease-causing bacteria have evolved defenses to even the most potent antibiotics, setting off a growing health crisis. The rise of antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” has also set off an arms race. As…

It’s shaped like a lemon, has a chemical composition unlike any we’ve ever seen before and may be raining diamonds internally.

Of the more than 6,000 confirmed exoplanets so far discovered, PSR J2322-2650b is one of the weirdest that…

Objects and events beyond our solar system can be tricky to visualize — and even trickier to understand.

We typically can’t see these objects themselves, just imprints of light that may be hundreds to billions of years old. Some objects…

Suffer from procrastination? Your ‘motivation brake’ might be to blame.

That’s according to a recent study from Kyoto University, whose experiments on macaque monkeys helped them discover a brain circuit that stops us from starting stressful…

An astronomer who has made ground-breaking discoveries about millisecond pulsars, gamma-ray bursts and supernovae and an “exemplary” mathematical geophysicist specialising in Earth’s magnetic field have each been awarded the Royal Astronomical…

Imagine studying a pseudoscorpion, a tiny arachnid that is almost too small to see. In 1891, Harvard curator Nathan Banks mounted such a creature on a microscope slide. Over 130 years later, that same specimen is still carefully preserved in the…