Nature

On 10 October 1957, Harold Macmillan sent a letter to President Dwight Eisenhower. The question he asked his US counterpart was: “What are we going to do about these Russians?” The launch of the Sputnik satellite six days earlier had carried with it the threat that Soviet military technology would eclipse that of the west. The prime minister was hoping to boost British nuclear capabilities, and was desperate for US cooperation.On that same day, however, the UK’s most advanced nuclear project went up in flames – putting…

While you doubtless don’t need to be reminded of the aeons we’ve known dogs and loved them, zoology has had a tendency to neglect them. “For decades in the 20th century,” Howard writes, “dogs were considered unworthy of rigorous study,” since focusing on them for insights into the animal kingdom was “like trying to understand the adaptations of a chicken’s egg by studying the crumbs of a wet cake”. Dogs were somehow rendered inauthentic, almost processed, by their emotional and physical proximity to us.In fact, counters…

Octopuses are doomed to be orphans from a very young age. After a female octopus lays her eggs, she stops eating and begins self-mutilating, tearing off her skin and biting off the tips of her tentacles.  By the time a young octopus wriggles out of its egg, its mother is already dead. A few months later, its father will die, too.The short and grim life of the octopus has long fascinated scientists. In 1944, researchers hypothesized that mating was somehow hitting a molecular "self-destruct" button within the sea…

In 1895, the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen noticed that a phosphor-coated screen gave off a green light when exposed to a cathode ray tube. He quickly realised that he’d found a new invisible ray. Asked what he thought when he saw this green light, he replied: “I didn’t think. I investigated.” In fact he spent seven weeks investigating, locked away in his laboratory and only coming out when his wife, Anna, insisted he eat something. He rewarded her concern for his wellbeing by using the unknown rays to make an image of…

New findings show a troubling lack of diversity—in participants and geography—in a fast-growing scientific field exploring nature’s effects on mental health. Credit: Joshua Brown/UVM New research shows that a rapidly-growing environmental science field—which measures nature's effects on human well-being—has a diversity problem that threatens its ability to make universal scientific claims.…

Hidden below the waves, the ocean contains vast reserves of sugar that we never were aware of, according to new research.Scientists have discovered that seagrass meadows on the ocean floor can store huge amounts of the sweet stuff underneath their waving fronds – and there are major implications for carbon storage and climate change.  The sugar comes in the form of sucrose (the main ingredient of sugar used in the kitchen), and it's released from the seagrasses into the soil underneath, an area directly affected by the…

Microlensing of gravitational waves. Credit: Roshni Samuel / Parameswaran Ajith / ICTSOne of the biggest puzzles in modern cosmology is the existence of dark matter, which constitutes most of the matter in the universe. Recent research by an international team of scientists has used gravitational waves to probe the nature of dark matter. This study was published recently in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Dark matter Several astronomical observations have established the existence of dark matter, which interacts with…