Inside the sky at night

WHEN you begin to learn a language, you can hardly believe these sounds mean anything to anyone. You persevere and some patterns start to sound familiar. Then you begin to catch tones and hints of mea

Harmonies in mathematics

Of the hundreds of thousands of asteroids in our solar system, it is all too feasible that one could strike Earth. If scientists discover this is likely to happen, what are our options for defending ourselves – and who will make the key decisions? Tomas Weber reports

Imagine an early human out on the savannah, stepping away from the evening fire, glancing up at the dark sky and being totally captivated by the tiny, twinkling sparks dotted everywhere. Eyes wide, he

I found your recent article Are We Aliens? (June, p62) very interesting. I noticed it mentioned that samples from the Mars Sample Return mission would “give us further clues” about the panspermia theo

Isn’t it amazing that astronomy – humanity’s oldest science – continues to generate such a delightful amount of new knowledge? Seeing as we’ve been studying the motion of the stars for a good long whi