In July 2025, astronomers spotted something remarkable passing through our Solar System, an object that had not come from anywhere nearby. Called 3I/ATLAS, it was travelling so fast and on such an unusual path that scientists quickly confirmed it had originated in another star system entirely. It is only the third object of its kind…
Isaac Newton (Image: Wikipedia) We often assume the smartest answer must be the most complicated one. Big words, tangled explanations, layers upon layers of detail. Surely anything that sounds this complex must be deep. Isaac Newton, one of the greatest minds in history, believed almost the opposite. Truth is ever to be found in simplicity,…
The mission is considered highly challenging because Swift was never designed to be repaired or physically captured in space. NASA is preparing an ambitious mission to save one of its ageing space telescopes from falling back to Earth, in what could become the first American attempt to use a robotic spacecraft to rescue and reposition…
Hippocrates (Image: Wikipedia) Cut your finger, and within days the skin knits itself back together without a single instruction from you. Catch a mild cold, and your body fights it off while you sleep. We tend to credit medicine for making us well, yet a great deal of healing happens on its own, quietly, inside…
Hold a three-pound weight in your hand. It isn’t much. A small bag of flour, maybe a chubby kitten. And yet, according to the physicist Michio Kaku, you’re holding the rough weight of the most complicated thing in our entire solar system. The brain weighs only three pounds, he wrote, yet it is the most…
Freeman Dyson (Image: Wikipedia) Ask an adult what killed their love of a subject, and you’ll often hear the same answer. The exams. Something they once found fascinating got flattened into a syllabus, a set of model answers, and a grade out of a hundred. The physicist Freeman Dyson saw the danger in that, and…
July often arrives with warm evenings that make it easier to spend time outdoors after sunset. For skywatchers, those comfortable nights also coincide with a calendar packed with changing celestial sights. Some are brief encounters lasting only a few hours, while others unfold across several weeks, rewarding anyone willing to look up after dark. Planets…
Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS has given astronomers an opportunity they rarely expect to receive. Unlike the countless icy bodies that circle the Sun, this object formed around another star before drifting into our solar system, carrying frozen material that has remained largely unchanged for billions of years. After passing closest to the Sun in late 2025,…
Democritus (Image: Wikipedia) It is one thing to behave well, and quite another to be good. Most of us can manage not to lie, cheat or steal, especially when someone is watching. But the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus pointed to a deeper kind of goodness. Real goodness, he said, is not merely not doing wrong,…
Most of us have done it at some point. We cram facts before an exam, repeat them back on the page, and forget almost everything within a week. The physicist Richard Feynman saw this happen on a large scale, and it genuinely puzzled him. People, he complained, do not learn by understanding. They learn by…
When the Pacific Ocean carried the effects of a powerful earthquake away from Russia’s far eastern coast in late July, most attention focused on the tsunami warnings issued across the region. Less visible was an unusual scientific opportunity unfolding hundreds of kilometres above the waves. By chance, a satellite designed to monitor Earth’s water systems…
In the closing years of the 19th century, German chemistry was moving between lecture theatres, factory floors, and military laboratories with an ease that feels strange in hindsight. Fritz Haber entered that world as someone who never quite settled into a single direction, drifting between academic curiosity and industrial usefulness. His work would end up…
