Something evil may be lurking in a black hole in Adam Roberts’s new novelLiuzishan/Getty Images Lake of DarknessAdam Roberts (Gollancz) I WAS recently asked for my definition of “hard science fiction” and I burbled something along the lines of “it...
Plant stem cells growing in cultureNew Dawn Bio What may be the world’s first piece of lab-grown wood isn’t quite big enough to qualify as a woodchip – it’s more like a splinter. But the tiny fragment could be a...
The pasta nanofibresBeatrice Britton/Adam Clancy Scientists have produced the world’s thinnest spaghetti strands, 200 times slimmer than a human hair. These would challenge even the speediest chef, overcooking in a fraction of a second, but they could have applications in...
We humans are nothing if not inventive. Our innovations have come to underpin virtually every facet of daily life—from what we eat to how we communicate. This ingenuity is intrinsically linked to both our outsize brain and our hands, which...
November 21, 20242 min readFirst Rocks Returned from Moon’s Far Side Reveal Ancient Volcanic ActivitySamples from the far side of the moon gathered by China’s Chang’e-6 mission record eons of tumultuous lunar historyBy Davide Castelvecchi & Nature magazineResearchers retrieve lunar...
Carolyn Beatrice Parker came from a family of doctors and academics, and she worked during World War II as a physicist on the Dayton Project, a critical part of the Manhattan Project tasked with producing polonium. (Polonium is a radioactive...
Allerton Waste Recovery ParkA.P.S. (UK)/Alamy A few years ago, I spent an interesting if pungent day visiting two of Europe’s most advanced waste processing facilities, a state-of-the-art rubbish dump near Espoo in Finland and a power station in nearby Vantaa....
Revenge on referees Our news colleagues Jacob Aron and Michael Le Page have drawn Feedback’s attention to a post on social media site BlueSky, which highlighted a scientific paper in awed tones. The study in question was recently published in...
Left: An image of the star WOH G64 taken with the Very Large Telescope Interferometer in Chile. Right: An artist’s impression of the starESO/K. Ohnaka et al., L. Calçada Astronomers have taken the first detailed picture of a star in...
November 21, 20245 min readGenetic Genealogy Can Stop Violent Criminals and Free the Wrongly ConvictedDespite investigative genetic genealogy revolutionizing cold case investigations, it has been underused to free the wrongly convictedBy David Gurney & James R. Mayer Klaus Ohlenschlaeger/Alamy Stock...
