Astronomers have catalogued more than five thousand planets orbiting distant stars, and a handful of them defy almost everything scientists thought they knew about how planets should look or behave. Using telescopes like Hubble, James Webb, and ground-based observatories such as Gemini South, researchers have found worlds so strange that they initially seemed implausible: a…

Every year, the dairy and tofu industries generate enormous quantities of protein-rich liquid waste that mostly gets thrown away. Scientists at ETH Zurich have now found a use for it that has nothing to do with food. Researchers led by materials scientist Raffaele Mezzenga extracted proteins from this waste stream, assembled them into tiny porous…

The night sky occasionally offers a reminder that the Solar System is far from empty. Bright comets appear with glowing tails, while reports of passing asteroids often make headlines. Although the two are frequently mentioned together, they are not the same kind of object. Both are remnants from the earliest stages of Solar System formation,…

Sixty metres beneath one of southern Africa’s driest landscapes lies a world that seems strangely detached from everything above it. The surface of the Kalahari Desert is defined by heat, sparse vegetation and long stretches of rocky ground, yet hidden underneath part of this vast region is a body of water so large that it…