The familiar comparison runs like this: there are more stars in the observable universe than grains of sand on every beach on Earth, a fact wheeled out in planetariums and pop-science segments as the ...

Frieda Caplan, the Los Angeles produce wholesaler who would later become the first woman to own and operate a produce company on the all-male LA Wholesale Produce Market, helped introduce kiwifruit to ...

In 2009 a drill crew in northeast Iceland went looking for very hot water and hit something that was still moving. They were working at Krafla, a volcanic caldera about ten kilometres wide in one of ...

Concept illustration of a laser-driven lightsail. This is an artist's concept, not a spacecraft that has reached relativistic speed. Credit: Breakthrough Initiatives. Source and project information. A ...

Quote of the day, from Friedrich Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” It’s the kind of line that can sound like a fridge magnet if you meet it cold, the sort of thing ...

In the late summer of 2011, Venus Williams won her opening match at the US Open and then, two days later, withdrew before the second round. The reason she gave was not an injury. She had been ...

The Sun accounts for about 99.86 per cent of all the mass in the solar system. Put the other way around, every planet, moon, asteroid and comet combined comes to roughly 0.14 per cent of the total, ...

Somewhere on the planet right now, somebody is the last living person who can tell a particular joke and have it land. The punchline runs on a word that exists in exactly one language, and that ...

Picture two versions of Earth. One is the planet outside your window, running its rainforests and coral reefs and pollinators for free, no bill attached. The other is a three-acre copy sealed under ...

NASA has placed Brian Hughes, its former chief of staff, in charge of the agency’s two largest launch sites. Hughes has no background in spaceflight engineering, civil space launch operations, or ...

KIC 8462852, or “Tabby’s Star” named after Tabetha Boyajian, the researcher at Louisiana State University (USA) who is leading its study, is a medium sized star, some 50% bigger than the Sun, and ...

A European team of astronomers has discovered the lightest known planet orbiting a star other than the sun (an “exoplanet”). The new exoplanet orbits the bright star mu Arae located in the southern ...