Life Zoologger: Infrared-sensing beetles born in fire Species: Melanophila consputa Habitat: coniferous forests of western North America , hoping for an arsonist to come calling On the morning of 10 August 1925, a bolt of lightning struck a large oil storage tank in a remote area of California. The oil immediately caught fire and burned fiercely. By the evening it was so … News
Space Who owns asteroids or the moon? Plans to mine minerals on celestial bodies could violate many aspects of international space law Opinion
Japan's record-breaking quake shaking table On 17 January 1995, the Japanese city of Kobe was devastated by a magnitude-6.8 earthquake . More than 6000 people died. Four years later, Japanese engineers began building the 3-D Full-Scale Earthquake Testing Facility – otherwise known as the world's biggest shaking table. In 2009, four years after its completion, photographer Stephen Vaughan visited the … Regulars
Space Dark matter, dark energy, dark… magnetism? There is a new suspect in the search for the mysterious force ripping apart the cosmos Features
Adventures in the physics garden Thinktank Science Garden opens at Thinktank museum in Birmingham, UK, on 2 June HAVE you ever run in a human-sized hamster wheel? I did recently, on a rainy day at the new Thinktank Science Garden in Birmingham, UK. As I gained momentum, feeling my feet run away with me, I started to buzz with adrenalin. … CultureLab
Enigma Number 1700 Polymagic From a box of counters numbered 1 to 12, Joe asked Penny to select a set of six and place them on the corners of a regular hexagon and then place the remaining six counters on the mid-points of each side, so that the number on each of these counters was the sum of … Regulars
Feedback: The elephant connection Elephantine configuration conundrum READERS have been commenting on that unusual unit of pressure, the elephant standing on a Mini Cooper (ESOAMC). Doug Cross wrote that if, as UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph had suggested, the pressure at the bottom of the Mariana trench in the Pacific Ocean is 8000 ESOAMC, "there's only room for a … Regulars