For decades, discussion about California’s next major earthquake has tended to revolve around a single fault. The southern stretch of the San Andreas has long been viewed as the state’s most closely watched geological boundary, largely because it has remained quiet since the mid-19th century despite continuing movement beneath the surface. That long silence has…
Far beyond the Milky Way, vast collections of galaxies continue to drift, gather and occasionally collide. One such region has drawn astronomers’ attention for decades. Known as CL0016+1609, this immense galaxy cluster contains hundreds of galaxies bound together by gravity and shines strongly in X-ray light. A newly highlighted image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope…
Mount Etna erupts with incandescent lava fountains and massive ash clouds, illuminating the Mediterranean night. Mount Etna in Italy is one of the most well-studied volcanoes in the world. It has been erupting for thousands of years, and scientists have been observing it closely for decades. But a new study from Cornell University has revealed…
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…
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,…