Quote of the day by Stephen Hawking In a single sentence, Stephen Hawking manages to make you feel very small and very important at the same time. First he cuts us down to size. We are clever apes, he says, living on an unremarkable planet, circling an ordinary star, in a universe almost too vast…
Sharing images from the exercise, Nasa said the ISS crew recreated a 2019 study using the official World Cup ball to understand how a football’s balance and centre of mass influence its movement. The official match ball for the 2026 FIFA World Cup has made an unlikely stop before the tournament- outer space.Astronauts aboard the…
Artemis III crew including, from left, Andre Douglas, Luca Parmitano, Randy Bresnik and Frank Rubio (Image/AP) Nasa is facing backlash over its decision to select an all-male crew for the Artemis III, a mission named after the Greek goddess Artemis and part of the programme that aims to return humans to the Moon.Critics questioned why…
Drop a glass and it falls, whether or not you believe in gravity. The Earth circles the Sun, whether or not it ever crossed your mind. That stubborn, slightly cheeky truth is the whole idea behind one of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s most quoted lines. He is making a simple point that lands harder the longer…
Sir William Osler (Image: Wikipedia) History is full of people who thought of something brilliant first and got none of the credit for it. Someone else came along later, explained the idea more clearly, pushed it harder, and won the fame. It feels unfair, and in a way it is. But it is also how…
The National Science Foundation on Thursday reversed a decision to dismantle a sprawling ocean monitoring network after vigorous objections from Democratic lawmakers and scientists who rely on it to track everything from ocean circulation to extreme weather.The NSF issued a statement saying that it “appreciates the concerns raised by the range of stakeholders” and would…
Galileo Galilei (Image: Wikipedia) Most of us meet mathematics as a school subject, a pile of sums and rules to survive before the bell rings. Galileo Galilei saw something else entirely. To him, maths was not a chore invented to torment teenagers. It was the secret code the whole universe is written in, the alphabet…
For years, a meteorite lay in the deserts of north-west Africa, seemingly no different from countless other rocks scattered across the landscape. Yet hidden inside it was a record of one of the Moon’s most violent eras, a geological story that had remained untold for more than three billion years.The meteorite, known as Northwest Africa…
Barbara McClintock (Image: Wikipedia) Imagine making a discovery so far ahead of everyone else that the experts in your own field simply do not believe you. They shrug, they look away, some of them quietly decide you have lost the thread. Most people would crumble, or at least back down. Barbara McClintock did neither. She…
There is something quietly circular about the sight of yesterday’s lunch becoming tomorrow’s stationery. In Japan’s Kagawa Prefecture, where bowls of thick Sanuki udon are part of the local identity, unwanted noodles are being given a second life that few would have predicted. Instead of heading for disposal, surplus udon is being turned into thin…
