Most of us have done it at some point. We cram facts before an exam, repeat them back on the page, and forget almost everything within a week. The physicist Richard Feynman saw this happen on a large scale, and it genuinely puzzled him. People, he complained, do not learn by understanding. They learn by…
A 23-year-old man from Louisiana has become one of the first people in the United States to be functionally cured of sickle cell disease using Casgevy, the world’s first approved CRISPR-based gene-editing therapy. Daniel Cressy, from Metairie near New Orleans, had lived with the inherited blood disorder since childhood, enduring severe pain crises and repeated…
Freeman Dyson (Image: Wikipedia) Ask an adult what killed their love of a subject, and you’ll often hear the same answer. The exams. Something they once found fascinating got flattened into a syllabus, a set of model answers, and a grade out of a hundred. The physicist Freeman Dyson saw the danger in that, and…
July often arrives with warm evenings that make it easier to spend time outdoors after sunset. For skywatchers, those comfortable nights also coincide with a calendar packed with changing celestial sights. Some are brief encounters lasting only a few hours, while others unfold across several weeks, rewarding anyone willing to look up after dark. Planets…
Imagine an animal that began its life centuries before the Roman Empire reached its height and has quietly continued its daily routine ever since. According to recent reports, scientists have identified a giant Caribbean sponge believed to have lived for around 2,300 years, making it one of the oldest animals ever documented. The sponge is…
Democritus (Image: Wikipedia) It is one thing to behave well, and quite another to be good. Most of us can manage not to lie, cheat or steal, especially when someone is watching. But the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus pointed to a deeper kind of goodness. Real goodness, he said, is not merely not doing wrong,…
Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS has given astronomers an opportunity they rarely expect to receive. Unlike the countless icy bodies that circle the Sun, this object formed around another star before drifting into our solar system, carrying frozen material that has remained largely unchanged for billions of years. After passing closest to the Sun in late 2025,…
Around three billion years ago, long before animals, forests, or even complex life existed, a large asteroid struck a young Earth. The collision happened at a time when the planet looked very different from today, with early continents still taking shape and geological processes operating in conditions that remain difficult to reconstruct. Much of the…
Image: University of Würzburg Getting stuck in sand has ended dreams of exploration before. On Mars, where loose dunes, soft soil and rocky terrain stretch for thousands of kilometres, a trapped rover can mean the loss of years of scientific work and millions in investment. Now, researchers in Germany have turned to an unlikely source…
The European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope has delivered one of the most detailed views ever captured of our galaxy’s crowded heart, revealing more than 60 million stars in a single extraordinary image. The observation offers astronomers an unprecedented look into the densely populated central regions of the Milky Way, a part of the galaxy…
