Category archives: Science

Nickel disulfide, NiS₂, is an unusual material. Its interior behaves as an electrical insulator, blocking the flow of current, while certain parts of its surface conduct electricity freely. This contradiction has puzzled physicists for decades, and a recent study offers a detailed explanation. The conduction, it turns out, is confined to tiny one-dimensional steps on […]

By 1800, water had already changed once. It was no longer one of nature’s simple terms, but a compound of hydrogen and oxygen (see Is Water H₂O? (1) From Element to Compound). The new chemistry had a powerful account of that change. What it still wanted was a more direct experiment: water itself, giving up […]

Author: Shireen Kassam, Visiting Professor, Health and Wellbeing Research Group, University of Winchester and Dagfinn Aune, Research Fellow, School of Public Health, Imperial College London More than 1.4 billion people worldwide live with high blood pressure (hypertension). It’s the single biggest metabolic risk factor for early death – driving diseases such as heart attacks, strokes […]

Researchers at Nagoya University have built a graphene nanoribbon that can switch which way it twists using a natural solvent. Graphene nanoribbons are thin ribbon-shaped structures made of fused carbon rings. Twisted or helical versions of these ribbons show promise for advanced light and electronic devices. However, no graphene nanoribbon could switch that twist on […]

Arsenic contamination in drinking water poses a critical global public health hazard. Prolonged exposure to inorganic arsenic—predominantly present in groundwater as arsenate, where arsenic exists in its +5 oxidation state—can lead to severe dermatological lesions, cardiovascular diseases, and cancers. To mitigate these health risks, the World Health Organization has established a strict provisional safety guideline […]

Take a walk in London’s Trafalgar Square this summer and wilting under the heat will be all sorts of body sizes, some tall, some short: a real mix of sizes. Picking just two from the crowd to represent the whole human species would be a tall order. But that is exactly what we do when […]

Take a glass of water. Nothing about it seems to ask for a theory. It has no colour worth naming, no dramatic smell, no visible architecture. It runs, freezes, boils, evaporates, dissolves, erodes, circulates and nourishes. It belongs to weather, geology, physiology, cooking and plumbing before it belongs to chemistry. Then science gives us the […]

Author: Richard de Grijs, Professor of Astrophysics, Macquarie University How do you explore a place where the Sun never shines? China’s space programme will soon embark on one of the most innovative lunar exploration missions in recent years. We’ve known for nearly two decades that some form of water exists on the Moon. What we […]

At the center of most galaxies lies a supermassive black hole, with a mass millions to billions of times that of our sun and some of the most extreme gravity in the universe. Some stars that venture too close to such black holes live to tell the tale. Rather than being completely destroyed, they survive […]

Authors: Phil Wiseman, Senior Research Fellow and Ernest Rutherford Fellow in Physics and Astronomy, University of Southampton and Mark Sullivan, Professor, University of Southampton A 2025 study by South Korean researchers caught the attention of the astronomy community when it suggested that the evidence behind dark energy could be wrong. Dark energy makes up about […]