British scientists have found scores of fossils the great evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin and his peers collected but that had been lost for more than 150 years. Dr. Howard Falcon-Lang, a paleontologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, said Tuesday that he stumbled upon the glass slides containing the fossils in an old wooden cabinet [...]
Members of the public are being asked to join the hunt for nearby planets that could support life. Volunteers can go to the Planethunters website to see time-lapsed images of 150,000 stars, taken by the Kepler space telescope. They will be advised on the signs that indicate the presence of a planet and how to [...]
Astronomers have determined exactly what colour our home galaxy the Milky Way is – and find it is aptly named. While it appears white from Earth, that is literally a trick of the light; the question is how it looks from outside. A comparison of star types in other galaxies gives perhaps an unsurprising result: [...]
The largest distant galaxy cluster has been spotted by astronomers using a telescope in Chile. Galaxy clusters are the largest stable structures in our Universe. Seven billion light years away and with two million billion times the mass of our Sun, the cluster was nicknamed “El Gordo” – “the Fat One” in Spanish. Astronomers reporting [...]
Stephen Hawking, the world’s most famous living scientist and a symbol of the triumph of willpower over adversity, has celebrated his 70th birthday, revealing he did not learn to read properly until he was eight years old, and that his schoolfriends had made a bet that he “would never come to anything”. A public symposium [...]
Astronomers have detected the first Earth-sized planets, which are orbiting a star similar to our own Sun. In the distant past they may have been able to support life and one of them may have had conditions similar to our own planet – a so-called Earth-twin – according to the research team. They have described [...]
Florida, US: NASA has launched the most capable machine ever built to land on Mars. The near one-tonne rover, tucked inside a capsule, left Florida on an Atlas 5 rocket at 10:02 local time. Nicknamed Curiosity, the rover will take eight and a half months to cross the vast distance to its destination. If it [...]
Judging by the run of successful natural disaster films in the past few years, people are fascinated by the idea of the end of the world. In Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, a virus ravaged the UK and beyond; an asteroid was the world-ending threat in Deep Impact and Armageddon; and climate change got a [...]
A team of engineers claims to have created the world’s lightest material. The substance is made out of tiny hollow metallic tubes arranged into a micro-lattice – a criss-crossing diagonal pattern with small open spaces between the tubes. The researchers say the material is 100 times lighter than Styrofoam and has “extraordinarily high energy absorption” [...]
If you think interplanetary space is a dangerous place now, with asteroids screaming by at close range and comets crashing into planets with the force of multiple H-bombs, be grateful you weren’t here 4 billion years ago or so. Back then, our solar system was still getting itself organized. Planets caromed around like so many [...]