China's Yutu rover on the Moon, seen by Chang'e 3. Justin Cowart/Flickr, CC BY-SA China has been the only country to land on the Moon for over 40 years – since the Soviet Luna programme. Its recent Chang’e missions (1-4) demonstrated that China could not only orbit and land onContinue Reading
Priti Patel says she didn't intend to harm staff. Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA I was nine. Some girl, maybe fifteen, old enough to tower over me, asked whether Bill Beattie was my brother. I nodded. Without saying another word she grabbed me by my hair and started to drag me across theContinue Reading
Artist impression of a solar disk in space. NASA It sounds like science fiction: giant solar power stations floating in space that beam down enormous amounts of energy to Earth. And for a long time, the concept – first developed by the Russian scientist, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, in the 1920s –Continue Reading
What will happens when students return home for Christmas? View Apart/Shutterstock As students returned to their campuses for the start of the new academic year, many universities initially reported localised surges in the number of COVID-19 infections. This was partly due to students living together in small areas, such asContinue Reading
The UK's Deputy Chief Medical Officer has urged his own mother to take the Covid-19 vaccine when it's released. Facundo Arrizabalaga One of the many lessons of the pandemic concerns the importance of communication: how the authorities frame a message can be as influential as the content of the messageContinue Reading
MadariaPix/Shutterstock The news of a potentially viable vaccine for COVID-19 is exciting, but even once we start administering an effective jab it will take a long time to halt the spread of the virus. Many countries are still trying to contain dangerous epidemics, and several have had to implement furtherContinue Reading
In moments of crisis we often turn to data in an attempt to both understand the situation we are in, and to look for answers of how to escape. In response to COVID-19, governments around the world have employed algorithms, used data from apps installed on our phones, alongside CCTV,Continue Reading
Mars 2020 Perseverance space mission launches from Kennedy Space Center. CRISTOBAL HERRERA-ULASHKEVICH/EPA-EE Donald Trump set bold goals for space exploration during his time in office – from crewed missions to the Moon and Mars to a Space Force. By contrast, his successor Joe Biden has been relatively quiet on spaceContinue Reading
Elise Robert/Shutterstock In a circular economy, we wouldn’t have any waste or pollution. Instead, everything we make and all our byproducts would be reused or repurposed, helping to end the over-exploitation of our finite resources and damage to our environment and climate. To make this process profitable, the manufacturers ofContinue Reading
An artist's impression of a gravitational micro-lensing event by a free-floating planet. JanSkowron/Astronomical Observatory, University of Warsaw. Most known planets orbit a star. These planets, including Earth, benefit from the star’s warmth and light. And it is the light emitted from these stars which makes it possible for us toContinue Reading
