Ajnabia odysseus lived 66 million years ago, making it one of the last dinosaurs on Earth Raul Martin Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth with the force of 10 billion atomic bombs and changed the course of evolution. The skies darkened and plants stopped photosynthesising. The plantsContinue Reading
Artist impression of WASP b and its star NASA, ESA, CSA, and J. Olmsted (STScI) Since the first planet orbiting a star other than the Sun was discovered in 1995, we have realised that planets and planetary systems are more diverse than we ever imagined. Such distant worlds – exoplanetsContinue Reading
A camera mounted on the tip of one of the Orion capsule’s solar array wings captured this footage of the spacecraft and the Moon NASA Neil Armstrong took his historic “one small step” on the Moon in 1969. And just three years later, the last Apollo astronauts left our celestialContinue Reading
How can it be December already. Luis Molinero/Shutterstock Think back to your childhood. December was the longest of months. It might have been filled with rehearsing school nativity performances, writing up your wishlist and savouring the morning’s advent calendar chocolate. But at times it felt like Santa would never arrive.Continue Reading
InSight's dusty solar panel. NASA/JPL Most of the worlds of our Solar System are pockmarked with impact craters. These bear testament to the violence of the early days of the Sun, when asteroids, comets and entire planets routinely collided with and annihilated each other. Our own Moon was most likelyContinue Reading
Darkdiamond67/Shutterstock How will life on Earth and the ecosystems that support it adapt to climate change? Which species will go extinct – or evolve into something new? How will microbes develop further resistance to antibiotics? These kinds of questions, which are of fundamental importance to our way of life, areContinue Reading
Thousands of galaxies seen by the James Webb Space Telescope. Nasa Everything in the universe has gravity – and feels it too. Yet this most common of all fundamental forces is also the one that presents the biggest challenges to physicists. Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity has been remarkablyContinue Reading
Research into psychedelics and their medical uses is making a comeback. 24K-Production via Shutterstock This is a transcript of The Conversation Weekly podcast episode: Psychedelic research: balancing trippyness with a new scientific rigor, published on September 29, 2022. NOTE: Transcripts may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quotingContinue Reading
Shrödinger's cat is world famous, but what does it really mean? Robert Couse-Baker/Flickr, CC BY-SA Quantum mechanics, the theory which rules the microworld of atoms and particles, certainly has the X factor. Unlike many other areas of physics, it is bizarre and counter-intuitive, which makes it dazzling and intriguing. WhenContinue Reading
3D rendering of an Neanderthal man RaveeCG/Shutterstock Imagine that you have an unhealthy interest in your neighbours’ lives. Unable to ask them directly, you rifle through their rubbish bins. You find the bones of cooked chickens and try and work out what else they eat. This is a bit likeContinue Reading
