Blurs

The Universe appears to be filled with an enormous cosmic web of galaxies, galaxy clusters, filaments and vast regions containing relatively few galaxies. One of the most intriguing possibilities in modern cosmology is that our own galaxy may sit inside an unusually sparse region. It is known as the KBC Void, named after astronomers Ryan Keenan, Amy Barger and Lennox Cowie. But this isn't an ordinary void. If the interpretation is correct, our cosmic neighbourhood could be significantly less dense than the Universe as a whole — potentially across a region approaching a billion light-years in scale. What is the KBC Void? The KBC Void was proposed following a 2013 study examining the distribution of galaxies around the Milky Way. Rather than finding a uniform distribution, the researchers found evidence that the density of galaxies increased with distance from us. Their results suggested that the region around the Milky Way could contain considerably less matter than the cosmic avera...

On 16 July 2024, a meteor crossed the sky over the northeastern United States. It was not subtle. The daytime fireball was seen across several states.  People reported the shockwave. Radar detected the event. And a doorbell camera captured part of its passage. Then a fragment came down in Hillsborough, New Jersey.  It smashed through the roof of a house. At first, it was an extraordinary piece of luck — a meteorite had effectively delivered itself to a laboratory. But the real surprise came later. Scientists examining the rock discovered something preserved inside it that was potentially far more valuable than the meteorite itself. Evidence that salty liquid water had once circulated through the asteroid from which the rock came. Within that altered material were also amino acids and a surprisingly diverse collection of carbon-bearing organic compounds. The meteorite had apparently spent billions of years carrying around the chemical consequences of an ancient extraterrestrial...

For years, the Denisovans were almost ghost-like. We knew they existed. We knew they had lived somewhere in Asia. We knew they had contributed DNA to some living human populations. And we knew remarkably little about what they actually did. The Denisovans became one of the strangest stories in human evolution precisely because their genetic legacy was much larger than their archaeological footprint. A few fragments of bone. A handful of teeth. Genetic traces surviving inside modern humans. And enormous gaps on the map. Now a cave in southwestern China is beginning to fill some of those gaps. Researchers working at Bianfu Cave in Yunnan have identified multiple Denisovan remains using ancient proteins and have reconstructed a remarkably long archaeological sequence stretching from approximately 190,000 to 70,000 years ago. The evidence suggests these people were repeatedly exploiting the landscape, hunting medium- and large-sized animals and using both stone and bone in ways that may no...

In the aftermath of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, something extraordinary happened inside a Roman villa at Herculaneum. A library was destroyed. But it wasn't completely destroyed. The papyrus scrolls inside were exposed to extreme heat, carbonising them into blackened, brittle cylinders. The writing survived in some cases, but the books became so fragile that opening them could destroy the very information researchers were trying to recover. For almost two thousand years, the knowledge inside remained effectively sealed. Now scientists are doing something that sounds completely backwards. They are burning scrolls on purpose. Not the ancient ones. They are making modern replicas, filling them with known writing, rolling them up and deliberately carbonising them. Then they scan the wreckage. The reason is simple: if researchers can understand exactly what happens to writing when a scroll burns, they may be able to work backwards from the damaged objects at Herculaneum and...