Science

Extreme heatwave sets records across Europe: The continent continues to experience extreme summer heat as temperatures have surged well above normal seasonal levels across several countries. Thermometers in parts of France and Spain have climbed above 40°C, with prolonged heat and little relief even during the night. Authorities have reported heat-related deaths in France amid…

For decades, Yellowstone has been held up as one of the clearest examples of a volcanic system fed by an immense column of hot rock rising from deep within the Earth. That picture has shaped scientific thinking about why the region remains volcanically active and how its future might unfold. A newly published study, however,…

By the 1980s, Costa Rica was facing an environmental crisis that few could have imagined just decades earlier. Once blanketed by lush tropical forests, the Central American nation had lost nearly half of its tree cover as logging, cattle ranching and agricultural expansion rapidly transformed the landscape. Wildlife habitats shrank, biodiversity declined, rivers became increasingly…

More than 150,000 people were forced to abandon their homes after the Fukushima nuclear disaster struck Japan in March 2011, transforming once-bustling towns into eerie ghost towns almost overnight. Families fled with only the essentials, believing they would soon return, but many never did. In the rush to escape the radiation, thousands of pets and…

The name Tristan da Cunha tends to sit at the edge of most atlases, almost as an afterthought in the South Atlantic, a small mark of land far from anything that feels busy or connected. Yet its story runs oddly thick for such a remote place. Ships once passed it as part of a long,…

Carl Friedrich Gauss (Image: Wikipedia) For a lot of people, mathematics is the subject they were glad to leave behind at school. Cold, hard, full of rules and one right answer. So it can come as a surprise that one of the greatest minds who ever lived didn’t merely respect mathematics. He crowned it. Mathematics…

When Spanish conquistadors entered the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in 1519, they described a sight so horrifying that many later historians believed it had to be exaggerated. According to their accounts, a massive tower and racks built from thousands of human skulls stood near one of the city’s most important temples. For centuries, these descriptions…

John Cockcroft (Image: Wikipedia) Some people don’t just contribute to the world. They bend its direction. The British physicist John Cockcroft, himself a Nobel Prize winner who helped split the atom, believed history turns on such rare figures. Human progress has always depended on the achievements of a few individuals of outstanding ability and creativity,…

A giant world orbiting a distant sun-like star has given astronomers an unexpected glimpse into the weather systems of some of the coldest known exoplanets. Using observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), researchers have identified evidence of salt-rich clouds in the atmosphere of GJ 504 b, a massive gas giant often referred to…

For most of scientific history, chemical elements were identified through materials that could be handled, heated, weighed or examined in a laboratory. Helium followed a very different path. It first emerged not from a rock, a gas sample or a chemical experiment, but from a thin yellow line hidden within sunlight.According to a Science Museum…