Feed aggregator

They’re a prolific, yet often elusive for northern hemisphere observers. If skies are clear, watch for a strong annual meteor shower that’s attained an almost mythical status: the May Eta Aquariids. The Eta Aquariid meteor shower is active from April 19th until May 28th, with the key night being the evening of May 5th into the morning of May 6th.

Researchers are perplexed by a galaxy that seems too large and too dusty for its place in cosmic history, less than a half-billion years after the big bang

Video: 00:03:10

What did space deliver for Europe this month? From the Moon to low Earth orbit and beyond, here’s what the European Space Agency has been up to.

Despite outward appearances, the internal workings of ice giants like Uranus and Neptune are extremely chaotic. Pressures millions of times greater than Earth’s sea level combine with temperatures in the thousands of degrees to make some pretty weird materials. Now, a new paper from researchers at the Carnegie Institution, published in Nature Communications, describes a completely new state of matter that might exist in these extreme environments - a “quasi-1D superionic” phase.

Researchers in South Korea say they have made a major advance by turning on genes with an electromagnetic signal, but critics say the claims are implausible and the paper is flawed

Researchers in South Korea say they have made a major advance by turning on genes with an electromagnetic signal, but critics say the claims are implausible and the paper is flawed

New science fiction from big names including Ann Leckie, Alan Moore and Martha Wells are just some of the exciting crop of titles out this month

New science fiction from big names including Ann Leckie, Alan Moore and Martha Wells are just some of the exciting crop of titles out this month

Sunlit arms of a

Updated on 30 April 2026

On 30 April 2026, four P120C boosters ignited and lifted Ariane 6 to the skies, for the second time. Flight VA268 took 32 satellites for Amazon’s Leo constellation to low-Earth orbit. Liftoff occurred at 05:57 local time (09:57 BST/10:57 CET) from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, with separation of the last satellites after 114 minutes.

The upper stage was then fired a third time to ensure a safe deorbit and allowing Ariane 6 to adhere to the zero debris approach.

Craig Venter has died aged 79. He was at the forefront of sequencing the human genome and of synthetic biology, but divided opinion in how he went about it

Craig Venter has died aged 79. He was at the forefront of sequencing the human genome and of synthetic biology, but divided opinion in how he went about it

Image: The great parachute bake-out

Scientist and medical technology entrepreneur J. Craig Venter published the first bacterial genome ever decoded in 1995. The result heralded a new age of discovery for genetics

Los Angeles public schools are limiting computer use in classrooms over health concerns. But experts say that approach is missing the problem

A technique inspired by the film Interstellar suggests a new way of communicating backwards in time, but it could help improve conventional communication systems as well

A technique inspired by the film Interstellar suggests a new way of communicating backwards in time, but it could help improve conventional communication systems as well

Video: 00:02:02

Watch ESA’s Mars chief engineer Albert Haldemann explain the sterilisation process of one of the parachutes of the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover mission and why it matters.  

Carefully wrapped inside a donut-shaped bag is a 35-m diameter parachute, about to be baked inside a specialised dry-heat steriliser oven. The parachute needs to be at least 10 000 times cleaner than your smartphone. 

To get rid of any microbes it might have picked up during its time on Earth, the parachute was heated up in a specialised oven at the European Space Agency’s Life Support and Physical Sciences Laboratory at ESTEC, the agency’s technical centre in the Netherlands. All air inside the cleanroom continuously passes through a two-stage filter, and everyone entering the chamber must gown up more rigorously than a surgeon before passing through an air shower to remove any contaminants. 

The 74 kg parachute, made mostly of nylon and Kevlar fabrics, will endure a six-minute dive into the thin martian atmosphere and slow down the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover for a safe landing on the Red Planet. This feat will make it the largest parachute ever to fly on the Red Planet, or anywhere else in the Solar System besides Earth.  

The ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover mission will launch in 2028 and spend over 25 months travelling to the Red Planet where it will search for signs of life beneath the martian surface. 

The potential existence of past and perhaps even present-day life on our closest planetary neighbour requires rigorous sterilisation, to make sure that no microbes piggyback their way there from Earth. Any terrestrial microbes hardy enough to survive the ride through space could interfere with the investigation by causing ‘forward contamination’ and triggering a false positive. 

Protecting the martian environment from ourselves, in accordance with international planetary protection measures, is as important as protecting the mission itself. 

A recent experiment revealed that individual dark points on a light wave can move faster than the wave itself

Image: Starry spiral in a familiar neighbourhood