The world's biggest diamond company, De Beers, recently announced it would start selling synthetic diamond gemstones for the first time in its 130-year history. Artificial diamonds have been manufactured since the 1950s but ...
Condensed Matter
Jun 1, 2018
8
769
Sometime around 3600 BC, people in the Balkan peninsula reached a major milestone: their mining and metal smelting created enough pollution for us to detect it today. Our research has revealed this was the beginning of the ...
Environment
May 30, 2018
3
367
We know that the birthplaces of stars are large molecular clouds of gas and dust found in space.
Astronomy
May 11, 2018
4
540
Rearing on its hind legs, the giant ground sloth would have been a formidable prey for anyone, let alone humans without modern weapons. Tightly muscled, angry and swinging its fore legs tipped with wolverine-like claws, it ...
Archaeology
Apr 26, 2018
2
783
Plants have become an unlikely subject of political debate. Many projections suggest that burning fossil fuels and the resulting climate change will make it harder to grow enough food for everyone in the coming decades. But ...
Ecology
Apr 20, 2018
67
249
If you've ever seen seals frolicking in the water, you know they are agile swimmers, with perfectly adapted paddle-like limbs. But if you think those flippers are just for swimming, then think again.
Plants & Animals
Apr 18, 2018
0
71
The remote Pilbara region of northern Western Australia is one of Earth's oldest blocks of continental crust, and we now think we know how it formed, as explained in research published today in Nature Geoscience.
Earth Sciences
Apr 17, 2018
2
93
Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars and sometimes they abruptly increase their rotation rate. This sudden change of spin rate is called a "glitch" and I was part of a team that recorded one happening in the Vela Pulsar, ...
Astronomy
Apr 12, 2018
15
281
Rumour has it that Albert Einstein spent his last few hours on Earth scribbling something on a piece of paper in a last attempt to formulate a theory of everything. Some 60 years later, another legendary figure in theoretical ...
General Physics
Mar 16, 2018
121
2430
Supermassive black holes, which lurk at the heart of most galaxies, are often described as "beasts" or "monsters". But despite this, they are pretty much invisible. To show that they are there at all, astronomers typically ...
Astronomy
Mar 2, 2018
82
490
