History

Fascinating objects illuminate the European Space Agency’s history

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By Gege Li ESA/Remedia Agency ESA/Remedia THIS selection of objects appears random, but it reflects the history, achievements and ambitions of the European Space Agency’s key establishment, the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC). ESA ESTEC in 99 Objects is an online project that uses a diverse collection of items amassed from ESA missions … Read more

Otherlands review: A fascinating journey through Earth’s history

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By Gege Li An artist’s impression of how Earth’s first multicellular animals looked on the sea floor Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library Book Otherlands: A world in the making Thomas Halliday OUR planet has existed for some 4.5 billion years In that time, it has undergone extraordinary changes, with landscapes and life forms that would seem … Read more

Latest Study Finds No Trace of Aliens in 4-Billion-Year-Old Martian Meteorite

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To date, we’ve found over a hundred precious Mars rocks that have travelled from the red planet and landed on Earth at some point. Among those, specimen ALH84001 might well be one of the most enigmatic.   This meteorite fragment was picked up during a snowmobile ride in the ice field of Alan Hills in Antarctica … Read more

The Solar System Exists Inside a Giant, Mysterious Void, And We Finally Know Why

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The Solar System floats in the middle of a peculiarly empty region of space. This region of low-density, high-temperature plasma, about 1,000 light-years across, is surrounded by a shell of cooler, denser neutral gas and dust. It’s called the Local Bubble, and precisely how and why it came to exist, with the Solar System floating … Read more

Richard Leakey’s Legacy in Science, Conservation and Politics

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Richard Leakey, paleoanthropologist, conservationist and Kenyan political leader, died January 2 at his home near Nairobi. His expeditions discovered hundreds of hominin fossils, leading Fred Spoor, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London to tell me his findings were “a most extensive and diverse fossil record of early human evolution.” Other scientists, conservationists, … Read more

The Convoluted History of The Modern Western Calendar

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For something that’s meant to lend order to our lives, the modern Western calendar has a messy history. The mess, in part, comes about because of the difficulty of coordinating the orbits of celestial bodies with the cycles of day and night, and the passage of the seasons.   The year measured by the earth’s … Read more

Frozen tardigrade becomes first ‘quantum entangled’ animal in history, researchers claim

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Tardigrades — those microscopic, plump-bodied critters lovingly known as “moss piglets” — have been put through the ringer for science. The amazingly durable creatures have been shot out of guns, bathed in boiling-hot water, exposed to intense ultraviolet radiation and even (accidentally) crash-landed on the moon, all to test the limits of their impressive “tun” … Read more

Scientists Unearth a Ginormous Triassic Sea Monster That Once Roamed The ‘Superocean’

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A sea monster that lived during the early dinosaur age is so unexpectedly colossal, it reveals that its kind grew to gigantic sizes extremely quickly, evolutionarily speaking at least.    The discovery suggests that such ichthyosaurs – a group of fish-shaped marine reptiles that inhabited the dinosaur-era seas – grew to enormous sizes in a span of only 2.5 … Read more