The milky way and the desert at Al Quaa. Image Credit: Wikipedia During the whole of August 2026, the night skies over the Arab world are offering a unique opportunity for residents to observe the Milky Way galaxy without any specialised equipment. According to a report by the Saudi Press Agency, this natural display is…
Galileo Galilei, whose studies of falling bodies and accelerated motion laid the groundwork for the principle later demonstrated by Apollo 15 on the Moon. Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons. Two people can look up at the same familiar Moon and experience it in completely different ways. One sees a flat, silver disk, a fixture of the…
Every winter, more than 100,000 giant Australian cuttlefish can be found mating along the rocky coastline of Point Lowly, northeast of Whyalla, South Australia. They put on shape-shifting, colourful displays in their attempts to attract a mate. This is the only cuttlefish aggregation in the world and thousands of enthusiastic fans travel to regional South…
For decades, quarries have been places where the landscape was deliberately cut, blasted and reshaped for industry. Rock was extracted, hillsides were carved away and deep pits were left behind once the material was no longer economically useful. But when the machinery finally stops, the story of a quarry does not necessarily end.Across the world,…
PC: Open Access Government On a warm day, a wall is usually something to escape from rather than something that helps cool a room. At Graz University of Technology in Austria, that assumption is being turned around with a ceramic structure that uses little more than water, porous clay and evaporation. The experimental cooling cubes…
A mosquito does not need to die for its role in malaria transmission to be interrupted. That idea sits at the centre of a 2025 study led by researchers associated with Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who tested a different way of using bed nets: instead of relying entirely on insecticides to kill…
For most of human history, the atmosphere was something felt rather than measured. People knew that air moved, pushed against sails and filled the lungs, but its physical weight was harder to demonstrate. In 17th-century Italy, that began to change. Evangelista Torricelli, a mathematician and physicist from Faenza, was working on a problem that had…
On the afternoon of 21 August 2017, millions of people across the United States looked towards the Sun as the Moon moved across it. For most viewers, the eclipse became a short-lived memory once the sky returned to normal. For Nia Payne, a 26-year-old woman in Staten Island, the event left something behind. Within days,…
For centuries, owning land has meant having a place that can be measured, divided and legally transferred. Dennis Hope thought he had found an exception. In the late 20th century, while considering how to make money from property, the unemployed American turned his attention away from land on Earth and towards the moon. He had…
Learning something from a finished textbook can give us a clear answer, but it does not always show us how that answer came to be. James Clerk Maxwell believed that students could gain something deeper by returning to the original work of the scientists who first developed an idea. In his words, “It is of…
