Science

Edward Jenner (Image: Wikipedia) Imagine being so happy about your work that you lose yourself in a daydream while walking through a field. That is exactly what happened to an English country doctor more than 200 years ago. His name was Edward Jenner, and the work that filled him with such joy went on to…

Frank Pittman (Image: psychotherapy.net) Frank Pittman could have said that marriage requires commitment. Plenty of people have said that. Relationship experts, religious leaders, grandparents, novelists. The thought itself is hardly new.Instead, he brought a submarine into the discussion.That is probably why the quote has survived.“Marriage, like a submarine, is only safe if you get all…

Humanity has already sent five spacecraft on trajectories that will eventually carry them beyond the Solar System, demonstrating that technologically advanced civilisations can launch interstellar probes. That raises an intriguing possibility. Could another civilisation have done the same and sent robotic explorers to our cosmic neighbourhood? According to a new study by astronomer T. Joseph…

The night sky occasionally offers a reminder that the Solar System is far from empty. Bright comets appear with glowing tails, while reports of passing asteroids often make headlines. Although the two are frequently mentioned together, they are not the same kind of object. Both are remnants from the earliest stages of Solar System formation,…

Sixty metres beneath one of southern Africa’s driest landscapes lies a world that seems strangely detached from everything above it. The surface of the Kalahari Desert is defined by heat, sparse vegetation and long stretches of rocky ground, yet hidden underneath part of this vast region is a body of water so large that it…

Astronomers have catalogued more than five thousand planets orbiting distant stars, and a handful of them defy almost everything scientists thought they knew about how planets should look or behave. Using telescopes like Hubble, James Webb, and ground-based observatories such as Gemini South, researchers have found worlds so strange that they initially seemed implausible: a…

Every year, the dairy and tofu industries generate enormous quantities of protein-rich liquid waste that mostly gets thrown away. Scientists at ETH Zurich have now found a use for it that has nothing to do with food. Researchers led by materials scientist Raffaele Mezzenga extracted proteins from this waste stream, assembled them into tiny porous…

The Arctic does not often give up its secrets quickly. Ice, distance, and long stretches of darkness have a way of preserving stories that would disappear elsewhere. As reported by The New York Times, in 2007, one such story surfaced from the body of a bowhead whale harvested during a subsistence hunt in Alaska. Hidden…

Albert Szent-Györgyi (Image: Wikipedia) The word research usually brings a very specific image to mind. White coats, laboratories, journals filled with dense writing, long processes that feel far removed from everyday life. It feels structured, almost distant. Something formal that belongs in academic spaces rather than ordinary thinking.Albert Szent-Györgyi’s quote shifts that picture slightly. It…

A cargo ship crossing the North Pacific encountered a powerful storm that swept several shipping containers into the ocean. One of those containers carried 28,800 plastic bath toys consisting of yellow ducks, blue turtles, red beavers, and green frogs. What appeared to be a routine shipping accident soon turned into one of the most unusual…