by Jonathan O’Callaghan If you want to build or fix something in space, you might think you’d need a human to do it. But what if you didn’t? What if robotic spacecraft could be used to refuel satellites in orbit, add new instruments to outdated machinery and even build entire structures while in space? This idea … Read more
by Richard Gray By 2030, a fifth of the fuel that motorists put into the petrol tanks of their cars could be alcohol, according to research concluding that new petrol and ethanol blends can reduce carbon emissions from Europe’s transport sector with little additional cost to consumers. Labels that carry a single letter followed by a … Read more
by Caleb Davies There is a certain romance to speleology, the study of caves, if you can see past the cold and the damp and the dark. Caves are ancient and often beautiful places. And they can be useful. Rock formations in caves, it turns out, hold within them chemical secrets that provide a window on both ancient civilisations … Read more
by Gareth Willmer Training programmes to improve people’s social and cognitive skills should target people in their late 30s and early 40s as these abilities start to decline earlier than previously thought, according to researchers who are looking at how social abilities change over time. It’s part of a field of work to collect long-term data … Read more
by Jonathan O’Callaghan We need to improve how we keep track of objects in space and predict where they will go in order to avoid collisions in Earth’s increasingly crowded orbit, according to Dimitra Stefoudi, a space law researcher from Leiden University in the Netherlands. In September 2019, the European science satellite Aeolus avoided a collision with … Read more
Patients with rare diseases often suffer a long and lonely path as they struggle to find out what the cause of their debilitating symptoms are, but recent advances in diagnostics are helping to give them new hope of identifying their illness, and perhaps even finding a treatment, according to Dr Lucia Monaco of Italy’s Fondazione … Read more