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Ventilation can make schools and offices safe from covid-19 – but how?

18 August 2021

Maximising airflow in public spaces is crucial to cut covid-19 transmission, but questions remain about what technology to use and how effective it needs to be

Why it is so important to protect access to the dark night sky

18 August 2021

The night sky has wowed people since the dawn of time, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to get a good view, writes Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

E08ERC Sand dune landscape in Arabian desert.

We need to fully explore the planet to understand our species' origins

18 August 2021

The study of human evolution has neglected huge areas of Earth, and recent discoveries from Arabia suggest these places have a lot to tell us

VPNs could be vulnerable to attacks that send you to fake websites

17 August 2021

Virtual private networks (VPNs), which have seen a rise in use as more people work from home, are vulnerable to an attack that removes the anonymity they grant users, researchers have found

Artificially stripped-back cell is still able to rapidly evolve

17 August 2021

An artificial “minimal cell” that has had all but the most essential genes stripped out can evolve and adapt to its surroundings just as fast as a normal cell

Illustration of our galaxy, the Milky Way seen obliquely, with the arms and the central bar in their approximate known locations. There are four major arms and one arm fragment (Orion-Cygnus or Local) where the Sun is found. In the annotated version of this image, the yellow dot indicates the position of the Solar System about 25000 ly from the galactic core. The Norma and Outer arms are in fact the same, but the two names refer to different parts of it. The same is true of the so-called 3kpc (3 kilo-parsec) arm, which further out becomes the Perseus arm.

Astronomers may have spotted a new spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy

16 August 2021

Researchers have found a colossal filament of gas called Cattail at the edge of the galaxy – it could be a new spiral arm of the Milky Way, but we have no clue how it formed

Covid-19: Why we can't count on herd immunity for protection

13 August 2021

The threshold for eliminating covid-19 in the UK through herd immunity is out of reach, so it’s time to think about how to live with covid-19 as a seasonal disease

Q1: Photograph of the silicon quantum circuit being connected to a circuit board in preparation for measurement. (credit: Serwan Asaad)

Using microwave beams could let quantum computers be small but mighty

13 August 2021

A decades-old theory to simplify silicon quantum processors has been shown to work, potentially paving the way for vastly more powerful quantum devices

Ancient dog faeces show how our canine friends became omnivores

13 August 2021

Gut microbes helped ancient dogs eat starch-rich food when farming led to a change in diet for people and their animals, an analysis of 3500-year-old dog faeces reveals

Snake-like robot could explore Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus

13 August 2021

A snake-like robot made of giant screws and flexible joints that can travel across hard or loose surfaces and worm into tiny spaces such as tubes and tunnels may be key to exploring the interior of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus