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…
Caption: Top left: A cinnamon-colored black bear and her cub flee. Top right: Brown bears on alert after hearing the sound of engines from an off-highway vehicle. Bottom left: A bald eagle eats a freshly caught meal from the nearby stream, ignoring the control sounds of gull calls. Bottom right: A black bear continues to…
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…
Haven or trap? Study finds sinkholes protect endangered tree at evolutionary cost China’s huge sinkholes, known as tiankengs (“heavenly pits” in Chinese), are both helping and harming one of the region’s most endangered plants at the same time. They protect the rare Magnolia aromatica tree from climate change, but they also keep its populations isolated,…
