Why the Colorado river is drying up – and what we can do about it
22 November 2022
The Colorado river is the lifeblood of the US Southwest, but today it is drastically depleted due to overuse, megadrought and climate change. Here’s how to rescue it
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Why cat-like creatures vanished from North America for 6 million years
12 January 2022
Around 23 million years ago, North America's sabre-toothed cat-like animals disappeared, leaving the continent without felines for several million years. Now palaeontologists are solving the mystery of this "Cat Gap"
The essential guide to the algorithms that run your life
16 June 2021
From shaping what we read and buy to diagnosing illness, algorithms play a key role in every aspect of our lives. Here’s what you need to know about the most important ones
Anousheh Ansari interview: Why everyone should see Earth from space
9 September 2020
The X Prize Foundation CEO on her unique experience as the first self-funded woman to fly to the International Space Station, and how innovation could help us cope with the covid-19 pandemic
Lisa Piccirillo: How I cracked a 50-year-old maths problem in a week
5 August 2020
Solving the Conway knot problem took mathematician Lisa Piccirillo on a journey into the fourth dimension. Here's how she did it
Chronic Lyme disease: How one tick bite can ruin your health forever
3 June 2020
For some people, the symptoms of Lyme disease never go away after treatment. Now we have clues about why this happens, supporting the idea that "chronic Lyme" really does exist
7 bizarre objects from the festival's worth of trash left on the moon
8 July 2019
The Apollo 11 lunar lander and other moon missions left behind some weird stuff, including cannons, bags of poop, golf balls and the secrets to top magic tricks
What would happen if you got sucked into a black hole?
16 April 2019
From wormhole passages to white hole escape routes, no one knows for certain what lurks beyond a black hole’s event horizon – so choose your own unsettling fate
Why do wombats poo cubes and turkeys spirals? One woman is finding out
18 December 2018
Engineer Patricia Yang won an IgNobel prize for flushing out a universal law of animal urination. Next up? Discovering why wombat stools come out as cubes
10 mysteries of the universe: What makes supermassive black holes?
19 September 2018
Black holes billions of times the mass of the sun pose a huge challenge to cosmic theories: there hasn’t been enough time since the big bang for them to form
