Science

ESA reserve astronaut John McFall has been selected for the first crew of Haven-1, a commercial space station built by the US company Vast, and is on track to become the first physically disabled person in space. The mission, targeted for early 2027, will last roughly 30 days and is designed to answer a question […]

Some go there to read about the wood that Victorian manufacturers used to make walking sticks. Others want to see an illustration of a Tasmanian tiger, or marvel at the field diary of one of the first known botanists to explore the Antarctic. Over the past 20 years, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) has grown […]

Cooling the brain is one of the most powerful neuroprotective strategies known to medicine. Lowering brain temperature by just a few degrees slows metabolism, reduces oxygen demand, and dampens the inflammatory cascades that cause secondary damage after stroke or traumatic brain injury. The problem has never been whether hypothermia works — it is how to […]

A landmark study published in The Lancet has recorded the first five-year period in which no woman aged 20 to 24 died from cervical cancer in England, directly attributing the milestone to the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination program that began in schools in 2008. Between 2020 and 2024, there were zero cervical cancer deaths in […]

A Chinese spacecraft that slipped into orbit around Earth with almost no public fanfare has now reached its true destination: a bizarre object called Kamo’oalewa that dances alongside our planet but is not quite a moon. Tianwen-2, China’s first asteroid sample-return mission, arrived at the 40-to-100-meter-wide space rock on June 7 after a year-long cruise, […]

By the time a baby takes its first breath, its brain already contains roughly 100 billion neurons connected by some 100 trillion synapses. The question of whether this infrastructure is sufficient for conscious thought — whether a newborn can think, feel, or be aware — has moved from philosophy into the laboratory, where a growing […]

A flycatcher bird can see flicker at 140 flashes per second. A human maxes out at about 60. For decades, this simple fact — the critical flicker fusion threshold (CFFT) — has been the go-to explanation for why animals might perceive time differently from us. The logic was intuitive: a higher flicker rate means faster […]

A drug already in human safety trials for Parkinson’s disease and ALS has shown a surprising new ability in mice: it restores the brain’s natural waste-disposal system, clearing toxic amyloid plaques and improving memory. The finding, published in ACS Chemical Neuroscience by researchers at Monash University and the University of Melbourne, opens a potential fast […]

You can read the entire published scientific literature on the Bundibugyo virus in an afternoon. That is not hyperbole. Before the current outbreak began in late April 2026, the virus had surfaced only twice in human history: in a 2007 outbreak in western Uganda that infected 149 people and killed 37, and in a 2012 […]

On June 10, 2026, the Science Programme Committee of the European Space Agency formally adopted a new space telescope with an ambitious and unusual assignment. Named ARRAKIHS — short for Analysis of Resolved Remnants of Accreted galaxies as a Key Instrument for Halo Surveys — the mission is designed to do one thing that no […]