Astronomers have spent years using the James Webb Space Telescope to examine the atmospheres of distant worlds, hoping those thin outer layers would reveal what lies beneath. For one of the galaxy’s most abundant classes of planets, that assumption may need another look.Many warm sub-Neptunes could contain far more water than their visible atmospheres indicate….
Marie Curie and her husband spent nearly four years boiling down seven tonnes of pitchblende in a leaky Paris shed with no ventilation to isolate one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride. Today, the notebooks they kept during those years, between 1899 and 1902, are kept in lead-lined boxes at the Bibliothèque nationale de France….
Mars still experiences powerful dust storms, but one patch of rock inside Gale Crater appears to have preserved something far older. What looks like a collection of layered stone has turned out to be a record of a single weather event that unfolded billions of years ago. Rather than relying on computer models or indirect…
Centuries after he transformed humanity’s understanding of the universe, Galileo Galilei continues to inspire people with ideas that extend far beyond astronomy and physics. Today’s Quote of the Day features one of his most enduring reflections on knowledge and discovery: “All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover…
A coral reef in the southern Andaman Sea, in Southeast Asia Cavan Images An international team of scientists has mapped more than 64,000 square miles of coral reefs that can withstand severe heat stress. The findings provide a vital plan for saving marine life while the world’s oceans experience their worst bleaching crisis ever recorded.The…
Isaac Newton (Image: Wikipedia) Every major scientific breakthrough starts the same unglamorous way, with a question nobody can yet answer. A line widely attributed to Isaac Newton captures that moment precisely. “No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess,” it goes. Before any evidence arrives to confirm or reject an idea, someone first…
A small piece of space history arrived through the roof of a New Jersey house. The meteorite that struck a home in Hillsborough in 2024 was not just an unusual visitor from the solar system; it became a rare scientific sample almost immediately after landing. Reportedly, it was preserved carefully by the homeowner who found…
Studies have shown that chimpanzee groups often rest on hilltops in places where conflicts with neighbouring groups are likely. (AI image) When we think about animals fighting, we often think that the fight happens in the heat of the moment. But scientists say the real story begins much earlier. Long before any fight starts, many…
Space-Based Solar Power (SBSP), a technology Japan is currently pioneering to ensure a sustainable future, has the ability to provide a world where solar energy never fades, even when the sun sets or clouds gather. At the heart of this journey is the OHISAMA project, named after a lovely Japanese term for ‘the sun’ that…
Across Massachusetts, an unusual partnership is bringing renewable energy and traditional farming together on the same land. Sheep are being brought onto ground-mounted solar farms, where the panels provide shade while the animals graze on grass and weeds growing beneath and between the arrays. Known as solar grazing, the practice gives solar operators a natural…
