The Sahara is often imagined as an endless expanse of sand, a landscape so harsh that permanent human settlement seems almost impossible. Yet the desert seen today is only a recent version of a much older place. Thousands of years ago, vast stretches of North Africa looked entirely different. Grasslands spread across regions that are…
The names of the days often feel so familiar that they pass unnoticed. They appear on calendars, meeting schedules and phone screens without inviting much thought. Yet hidden inside those ordinary words is a record of how earlier societies understood the heavens.Long before modern astronomy explained planets and orbits, people paid close attention to the…
A massive galaxy in the early universe has been caught in the final stages of its life, providing astronomers with some of the strongest evidence yet for how giant galaxies die. Using observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimeter Array (ALMA), researchers have identified a powerful outflow of gas…
Jonas Salk (Image: Wikipedia) A few years ago, a university lecturer described a scene that repeated itself every autumn. New students would arrive carrying boxes, bedding and more parental advice than they could possibly use. Mothers adjusted collars. Fathers offered practical tips about bank accounts, train tickets and budgeting. Everyone tried to appear calm.Then came…
There is a familiar habit in the tech world of treating efficiency as a kind of reset button. If machines get faster, smaller, and smarter, then the resources behind them are assumed to shrink too. That idea is now being tested more uncomfortably. A recent United Nations report has pulled together a range of projections…
On 30 June 1971, recovery teams in Kazakhstan approached a Soyuz capsule that appeared to have completed a flawless return from space. The spacecraft had undocked from the world’s first space station, survived re-entry, deployed its parachutes, and landed exactly as planned. Yet when the hatch was opened, commanders found all three cosmonauts dead. The…
Far out in the south-eastern Indian Ocean, a vast and largely unexplored stretch of seafloor is reshaping how scientists understand deep-ocean history. Hidden within the Diamantina fracture zone, the seabed is marked by long scars, deep trenches, and ridges that plunge into near-total darkness under extreme pressure. Across this 1,200-kilometre corridor, whale remains have been…
The ascent of a 6,200-metre (20,341 ft) volcano by a walking humanoid machine sounds, at first, like one of those lab demonstrations that never quite leaves controlled conditions. Yet this time it did. A modified robot reached the summit of Chimborazo in Ecuador, spending hours moving across ash, rock, and ice before being carried through…
Most people notice litter, shake their heads and move on. Edgar McGregor did something different. In 2019, while hiking through California’s Eaton Canyon, the Pasadena resident was struck by the sheer volume of rubbish scattered along trails, tucked beneath bushes and caught in streambeds. Plastic bottles, food wrappers and discarded containers had become a familiar…
A patch of the Pacific Ocean has been quietly warming again, drawing attention from meteorologists who spend their time watching patterns most people never think about. The signals are not dramatic on their own: a few degrees here, a shift in sea surface temperatures there, winds behaving slightly differently than expected. But these small changes…