The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is about to open a new eye on the universe Olivier Bonin/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory On top of Cerro Pachón, a Chilean mountain that reaches more than 2600 metres above sea level, the air is thin. I have to catch my breath as we climb the stairs inside the dome…
An egret takes off at Pallikaranai marsh in Chennai, India Muralidharan Alagar Arts and Photography/Getty Images IntertidalYuvan Aves (Ithaka) When Yuvan Aves was a boy, a search party had to be sent out after he went missing. It turned out he had been so enthralled, sitting by a pond, watching a small bird of prey leap…
In the world of black holes, there are generally three size categories: stellar-mass black holes (about five to 50 times the mass of the sun), supermassive black holes (millions to billions of times the mass of the sun), and intermediate-mass black holes with masses somewhere in between. While we know that intermediate-mass black holes should…
A 110-million-year-old fossil of the hell ant Vulcanidris cratensis Anderson Lepeco At more than 110 million years old, a fossil excavated in Brazil is the oldest undisputed ant fossil ever discovered. The finding adds to evidence that the first ants evolved on the supercontinent of Gondwana in the southern hemisphere before spreading across the rest…
Bone collector caterpillars from the Waianae mountain range in Oahu, Hawaii Daniel Rubinoff et al. 2025 The newly described “bone collector” caterpillar species disguises itself with the body parts of dead insects so that it can live among spiders and poach their prey. This is the only caterpillar known to use such grisly camouflage or…
Ecuador’s Rio Los Cedros is a source of insight for Robert Macfarlane Murray Cooper/Minden Pictures/Alamy Is a River Alive?Robert Macfarlane (Penguin Books (UK) W. W. Norton (US, 20 May)) Early on in this often beautiful, wild and wildly provocative book, Robert Macfarlane recounts telling his son the title of his project. The boy exclaims that…
Enter the Royal Society in London – the UK’s national academy of science – and you will see a three-word phrase: “nullius in verba“. This motto, held for over 350 years, translates to “take nobody’s word for it”, meaning science cannot simply be taken on trust; it must be backed by evidence. But what is…
Where do you go when you’re a fish and you need a skincare treatment? Coral reefs contain natural “beauty salons,” lively social hubs of activity where fish “clients” swim up and wait to be serviced by smaller fish cleaners. The little cleaners dart under and around their much bigger clients — even entering their mouths…
Esme Stallard Climate and science correspondent Getty Images Garfield, Puss in Boots, Aristocats’ Toulouse – cultural icons maybe, ginger most certainly. And now scientists across two continents have uncovered the DNA mystery that has given our furry friends, particularly males, their notable colour. They discovered that ginger cats are missing a section of their genetic…
Artemis I sits at Launch Pad 39-B at Kennedy Space Center Tribune Content Agency LLC/Alamy The Stern-Gerlach experiment is, in my opinion, truly the first test that forced the results of quantum mechanics onto the scientific community. Proposed by Otto Stern and conducted by Walther Gerlach in 1922, it showed that atoms have a quantum…
