The secret life of scientific ideas

Many of the most memorable stories in the history of science revolve around the conscious realization of an idea - the "Eureka!" moment. But what triggers these moments? Is there always some serendipitous event preceding ...

Biophysicists take small step in quest for 'robot scientist'

Biophysicists have taken another small step forward in the quest for an automated method to infer models describing a system's dynamics - a so-called robot scientist. Nature Communications published the finding - a practical ...

How mathematics reveals the nature of the cosmos

Let us discuss the very nature of the cosmos. What you may find in this discussion is not what you expect. Going into a conversation about the universe as a whole, you would imagine a story full of wondrous events such as ...

Image: XMM-Newton self-portraits with planet Earth

This series of images was taken 15 years ago, a couple of months after the launch of ESA's XMM-Newton space observatory. These unique views, showing parts of the spacecraft main body and solar wings, feature a guest of honour ...

A solar eclipse sheds light on physics

On 29 May 1919, a shadow dance took place over the Caribbean which was to make history: While the new moon covered the blazingly bright disk of the Sun, astronomers around Arthur Stanley Eddington measured the shift of stars ...

Image: Thor's Helmet nebula in the X-ray spectrum

This brightly coloured scene shows a giant cloud of glowing gas and dust known as NGC 2359. This is also dubbed the Thor's Helmet nebula, due to the arching arms of gas stemming from the central bulge and curving towards ...

Telescopes give shape to furious black hole winds

NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and ESA's (European Space Agency) XMM-Newton telescope are showing that fierce winds from a supermassive black hole blow outward in all directions—a phenomenon that ...

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