SUGAR AND ALCOHOL have been discovered in the icy furrows of comet Lovejoy. The comet’s orbit is highly elliptical. On a close arc around the sun, blue-green sails of booze and sugar trail off into space. Lovejoy marks the first time that ethyl alcohol (or ethanol), the same type we use in drinks here on Earth, has been … Continue reading
THE FIRST PERSON TO LIVE TO 1000 YEARS OLD MAY HAVE ALREADY BEEN BORN, says gerontologist Dr. Aubrey de Grey. According to de Grey, age itself is a disease. And the cure is close. “We are working to develop medicines that will bring ageing under true medical control,” says de Grey, former professor at Cambridge University … Continue reading
THE BLACKEST SHADE OF BLACK EVER is known as Vantablack, and British-Indian artist Anish Kapoor has been given the exclusive artistic licence to use it. “It’s so black you almost can’t see it,” Kapoor told BBC Radio 4. “Imagine a space that’s so dark that as you walk in you lose all sense of where you are, … Continue reading
So you’ve fallen into a black hole. Oh dear! The gravitational pull of these collapsed stars is so fierce that not even light can escape—hence the name, black. And the further you fall, the fiercer it gets. If you’ve slipped in feet-first, the exponential suck of gravity will be pulling on your toes at forces … Continue reading
Special Relativity is the 1905 babe of Albert Einstein, a physical theory on the interwoven relationship between space and time. In physics today it stands as an accepted and experimentally well-confirmed set of ideas. Consider the following. In a field by some train tracks, James throws a ball to Larry at 20 km/h, which he catches amiably. … Continue reading
THE TIME TRAVEL RECORD is held by retired cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, who trumps us all with 23 milliseconds more reality than you or I. Yes, it’s a stretched qualification for ‘time traveller’ — the sharper way to put it is that for Krikalev, time has been slightly dilated. Slowed down, as it were, leaving him … Continue reading
PEOPLE WHO IDENTIFY AS VAMPIRES because they believe they need to drink human blood to stay healthy often find it difficult opening up to health professionals, fearing ridicule, disgust and a mental health diagnosis, a study has found. They walk among us. The blood-drinkers. And you couldn’t pick them from a normal person—because that’s what … Continue reading
THE MARTIAN HAS HIT CINEMAS, bosomed by director Ridley Scott and Matt Damon as the man on Mars—it’s made some splashes. The film enjoyed the juicy publicity that came with NASA’s recent announcement of liquid water on the surface of Mars. Exciting stuff. Days earlier NASA dangled this “major discovery” as a big secret, so … Continue reading
— Billy Wright HUMANS ALLURED by the dreams of an android. Or at least, by the visions of image-recognition software with an artificial neurology. They’ve been shared rampant across the internet, you may have noticed: photographs of once people now becoloured with a psychedelic rash, their eyebrows shorn but with new eyes sprouting from the … Continue reading
SIX HOPEFUL ASTRONAUTS have spent the last seven months inside a geodesic dome on the red slopes of Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii to simulate what it would be like to live on Mars. It’s some way off from the real thing (~225 million kilometres on a good day), but researchers of NASA chose the … Continue reading
