A river has my heart. It’s not the austere, black Thames winding through London, where I was born, but a lazy green one 5,000 miles away, where I spent my adolescence: the Blanco River in Texas. My maternal ancestors have dipped into its waters for generations, as I have on countless summer days. The Blanco … Read more
Open the mouth of a snapper lying on a fishmonger’s ice and, every so often, something looks back. Not a tongue. A pale, plated crustacean roughly the length of a thumbnail, wedged into the floor of the mouth on seven pairs of hooked legs, sitting exactly where the tongue should be and doing more or … Read more
Deep in the Amazon, while filming a National Geographic documentary series alongside actor Will Smith, a team of scientists stumbled onto something few ever see: an anaconda stretching a remarkable 7.5 meters. The jungle seldom gives up its secrets, but this discovery illuminated both the immense biodiversity of the rainforest and the growing threats pressing … Read more
2026-08-10T09:45:55.037Z Greetings from East Greenland – Weather prospects are not looking promising for eclipse day If only we could bring this good weather with us for eclipse day. (Image credit: Daisy Dobrijevic/Future) Good morning space fans! What a beautiful start to the day here in East Greenland. If only we could bring this good weather … Read more
It’s the shuddery stuff of nightmares for some, but for a select group who admire extending ladders, giraffes and the Odyssey, one of the longest animals in the world is bound to appeal.This creature is nneither the blue whale, nor a lion’s mane jellyfish but the humble bootlace worm, Lineus longissimus, one of the most … Read more
NEW YORK (AP) — The Perseid summer light show is back — and viewing conditions are especially promising for the Northern Hemisphere. The meteor shower’s peak Wednesday night into Thursday morning coincides with a total solar eclipse across Spain, Iceland and Greenland and a six-planet parade — though the best time to view the fireballs … Read more
On August 12, 2026, starting at 15:34 GMT, the moon’s shadow will race from the Arctic across Greenland, Iceland and Spain, blotting out the sun for as long as two minutes and 18 seconds.Wednesday’s eclipse will be mainland Europe’s first total solar eclipse since 1999, with about 15 million people, mostly in Spain, living in … Read more
A child who can count 250 stars from home tonight may be able to see fewer than 100 from the same place at age eighteen if the recent measured rate of night-sky brightening continues. The stars would still be there. The difference would be the artificial light scattered through Earth’s atmosphere between them and the … Read more
In less than a week, you can see as many as 50-100 meteors per hour!The Perseid Meteor Shower (or “The Perseids”) is considered one of the best meteor showers of the year, according to NASA.Each year, Earth passes through a trail of debris left by the comet Swift-Tuttle. When that space debris enters Earth’s atmosphere, … Read more
Mercury is the smallest planet in the Solar System, but most of the distance from its centre to its surface passes through metal. NASA puts the radius of Mercury’s metallic core at about 2,074 kilometres, compared with a planetary radius of 2,440 kilometres. That is roughly 85 per cent of the planet’s radius. The percentage … Read more