Science

The bookends of time

Nothing lasts forever: not humanity, not Earth, not the Universe. But finitude confers an indelible meaning to our lives

Thomas Moynihan

Roaming rocks

Metamorphic rocks are our emissaries from the deep, travelling to alien realms and revealing the restless nature of Earth

Marcia Bjornerud

Exploding the Big Bang

It was thought that science could tell us about the origins of the Universe. Today that great endeavour is in serious doubt

Daniel Linford

Why do the building blocks of life possess a mysterious symmetry?

12 minutes

Why the golden age of total solar eclipses is already behind us

5 minutes

When does after begin?

Three earthquakes hit Mexico City on the same date in 1985, 2017 and 2022. The coincidence left the city stranded in time

Lachlan Summers

When algae met fungi – the hidden story of life’s most successful partnership

4 minutes

In an ancient English rainforest, John creates charcoal and cultivates growth

12 minutes

The idea that life on Earth originated elsewhere is not as far out as it seems

6 minutes

The Rift

Splitting the African continent, it is the only place where our human story can be read continuously from the very start

Tristan McConnell

Why making if-then connections might be the key to consciousness

5 minutes

Telescopes on the Moon

Our future in space relies on settling the Moon and using it as a base to probe the deepest questions in the cosmos

Joseph Silk

Mutual entrapment

As Neolithic people transformed prehistoric forests, they stumbled into an ecological trap. Domestication goes both ways

Mette Løvschal

Dark horses in the cosmos

Could primordial black holes from the beginning of time explain ‘dark matter’, the mysterious missing mass in the Universe?

Briley Lewis

This riotous life

There’s no rhythm to mass extinctions, no pattern to evolutionary recovery. Life bursts forth, in cacophonous adaptation

Riley Black

‘Ice has a memory’ – an Inuit poem contemplates scientific exploration of Greenland

28 minutes

The cosmic chasm

Physics as we know it is elegant and exquisitely accurate. It tells almost nothing about the deepest riddles of the Universe

Pedro G Ferreira

Origin story

Perched on the cusp between biology and chemistry, the start of life on Earth is an event horizon we struggle to see beyond

Natalie Elliot

The planet is burning

Wild, feral and fossil-fuelled, fire lights up the globe. Is it time to declare that humans have created a Pyrocene?

Stephen J Pyne

The cosmic now

Are you here now? Impossible to say. The idea that any group of events can truly happen at once is just an illusion

Anthony Aguirre

Deep time and beyond: the great nothingness at the end of the Universe

29 minutes

We are heading for a New Cretaceous, not for a new normal

Peter Forbes