Science

Incredible testimonies

In the 1980s, thousands of Americans began to suspect they may have been abducted by aliens. What happened?

Greg Eghigian

A nasogenital tale

A bizarre theory (and a gory surgery) in fin-de-siècle Vienna help us get a grip on how science and medicine actually work

Urte Laukaityte

The light beyond sight

Only a tiny sliver of the Universe’s light can be seen by human eyes. But today we’re catching glimpses of the invisible

Corey S Powell

Meet the Quaker pacifist who shattered British science’s highest glass ceilings

14 minutes

Ideas ‘of pure genius’ – how astronomers have measured the Universe across history

29 minutes

The cat that wouldn’t die

The weird paradox of Schrödinger’s cat has found a lasting popularity. What does it mean for the future of quantum physics?

Jim Baggott

Beanbag genetics

Today a bitter dispute about the nature of biology is underway. A simple bag of beans may be what tips the balance

Zachary B Hancock

Legacy of the angels

When medieval scholars sought to understand the nature of angels, they unwittingly laid the foundations of modern physics

Rebekah Wallace

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

Beyond causality

In order to bridge the yawning gulf between the humanities and the sciences we must turn to an unexpected field: mathematics

Gordon Gillespie

How the Moon became a place

For most of history, the Moon was regarded as a mysterious and powerful object. Then scientists made it into a destination

Danny Robb

The birth of naturalism

The modern era is often seen as the triumph of science over supernaturalism. But what really happened is far more interesting

Peter Harrison

Chemical laws

Often dismissed as the poor cousin of the sciences, chemistry has revealed natural laws that illuminate our Universe

Vanessa A Seifert

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

The eugenicist of UNESCO

Why did Julian S Huxley, first director of the UN agency, think eugenics held the key to a more evolved, harmonious world?

Stefan Bernhardt-Radu

The city of wisdom

Don’t be intimidated by physics: it is made of stories and metaphors. Learn these and the field will open up to you

Jamie Zvirzdin

The rarely told story of the fruit flies, primates and canines that preceded us in space

12 minutes

Stars behaving absurdly

For centuries, the only way in which to illuminate the mysteries of black holes was through the power of mathematics

Steve Nadis & Shing-Tung Yau

Forwards, not back

Medicine aims to return bodies to the state they were in before illness. But there’s a better way of thinking about health

Kate MacCord & Jane Maienschein