Dark energy is one of those cosmological features that we are still learning about. While we can’t see it directly, we can most famously observe its effects on the Universe – primarily how it is causing the expansion of the Universe to speed up. But recently, physicists have begun to question even that narrative, pointing
An international team led by the University of Oxford has identified one of the most massive and unusual structures in the Universe, a giant cosmic filament located 140 million light-years away. This structure, composed of a “razor-thin” string of galaxies, is rotating in a way that challenges existing theories about galaxy formation. The study, published
The hills of South Moravia have yielded thousands of Stone Age artifacts over decades of excavation, most of them anonymous fragments of a distant past. But a cluster of 29 stones found in 2021 at the Milovice IV site presents archaeologists with something different: the possibility of seeing a single person. The stones were not
The hills of South Moravia have yielded thousands of Stone Age artifacts over decades of excavation, most of them anonymous fragments of a distant past. But a cluster of 29 stones found in 2021 at the Milovice IV site presents archaeologists with something different: the possibility of seeing a single person. The stones were not
One of Simon Clark’s most popular TikTok videos begins with him playing the part of a clueless climate contrarian. Adopting the overconfident tone that is common among social-media influencers, he proclaims: “Renewables are a scam!” The ‘PhD influencers’ logging lab life on TikTok and Instagram Cut to the real Clark, who has a PhD in
Scientists have found groundwater dating back 1.2 billion years in the Moab Khotsong gold and uranium mine, located in South Africa’s Witwatersrand Basin. The find, buried 3 kilometers beneath the Earth’s surface, is enriched with the highest concentrations of radiogenic products ever detected in groundwater. This ancient groundwater offers a rare glimpse into subsurface conditions
4. Everything you can see—stars, planets, galaxies, your phone, you—makes up less than 5% of the universe. Based on current cosmological models, about 68% of the universe is Dark energy and roughly 27% is Dark matter. Together, that’s around 95% of reality made of stuff we can’t directly see. All the “normal” matter, like the
The coming decades of space exploration hinge on a single, stubborn number: the 225 million kilometres between Earth and Mars. Chemical rockets, the workhorses of every space programme to date, take roughly eight months to cover that distance. Russian researchers now claim they can shorten the journey to 30 days using an engine that turns
Computer science, at its most fundamental, is all about inputs and outputs. Consider the simple case of multiplying two numbers on a pocket calculator. You punch in some inputs — the specific numbers you want to multiply — and the screen displays an output representing their product. The reverse problem of breaking a number into
A magnificent annular solar eclipse just swept over Antarctica, putting on an impressive display of orbital mechanics as the moon passed in front of the sun at the perfect distance from Earth to create a fiery halo in a darkened sky — at least for the few souls lucky enough to be in a position