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 […]
Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have spotted an extremely bright red spot in the early universe. The object resembles an enormous star, spanning the size of our solar system. But it also is putting out 100 billion times more energy than any known star can physically produce. In fact, such energies are closer to what […]
Artificial Intelligence • Mathematics • Philosophy of science
Author: Melissa Lee, Senior Lecturer, School of Mathematics, Monash University Some weeks ago, artificial intelligence company OpenAI announced ten advances in mathematics and computer science made with their as-yet unreleased model Astra. The discoveries cover a wide range of mathematical fields, including geometry, cryptography and coding theory. These ten are just the latest in a […]
How much ice is stored in the world’s glaciers? And where exactly is it located? A new study led by Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, in collaboration with the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR-ISP), provides an updated global map of glacier ice volume. The study introduces IceBoost v2.0 […]
Arctic terrestrial permafrost ecosystems store around 1,300 gigatonnes of carbon from organic sources, such as from the remains of plants. Sediments in oceans and river deltas contain a further 400 gigatonnes. Global warming, however, is taking its toll on this natural freezer: temperatures in the Arctic are rising faster than anywhere else on our planet […]