Space Astrophile: The diamond as big as a planet brightcove.createExperiences(); Video: Diamond planet found orbiting a pulsar Could the Serpens constellation, 848 light years away, be home to the biggest diamond ever detected? Astrophile is our weekly column covering curious cosmic objects, from within the solar system to the furthest reaches of the multiverse Object type : Exoplanet Mass : Equal to Jupiter Cruising … News
Life Svante Pääbo: The man rewriting human evolution Questioning what it means to be human He has already revealed that early humans interbred with Neanderthals and discovered a whole new type of hominin from its DNA alone. Now Svante Pääbo is setting his sights on even more exotic discoveries. He tells Alison George why he thinks the bombshells will keep coming Last year … Opinion
Particle quest See more: To see the image this article refers to, keep checking Picture of the Day on our news blog Short Sharp Science AT THE forefront of the hunt for elusive particles is the Gran Sasso National Laboratory , the largest underground facility of its kind. Located under a mountain between L'Aquila and Teramo in … Regulars
Earth What lies beneath: Exploring the ocean depths Once more unto the deep Half a century after our first and only visit, humans are returning to the deepest point in the ocean to uncover its secrets IT IS a sobering fact that more people have walked on the moon's surface than have visited Earth's lowest spot. During six Apollo missions between 1969 and … Features
How science shaped the stories of Ray Bradbury Sci fi and fantasy author Ray Bradbury's experiences of the Atomic and Space Ages are evident in his curious stories of Earth's destruction and life on Mars, says biographer Jonathan R. Eller RAY BRADBURY, the science fiction and fantasy author behind such classics as Fahrenheit 451 , infamously claims to remember the details of his … CultureLab
Enigma Number 1662 Red face? Our local craft shop stocks an ornament made of a piece of carved wood. Its surface consists of a number of faces, all being different colours but the same-sized regular polygon, and with the same number of faces meeting at each vertex. I bought a number of these ornaments, all absolutely identical, and … Regulars
Feedback: How big is my landslide? How big is my landslide? FEEDBACK understands the motivation for expressing unfamiliarly large quantities in blue whale units, and so forth (19 June 2010) . But what can have been going through the mind of a journalist on the New Zealand Herald ? That paper published on 19 August the news that "the Manawatu Gorge … Regulars