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...universe. That means everything that moves, moves through it. In this model, anything with mass distorts the space-time fabric. The larger the mass, the larger the distortion. And since every moving object moves through space-time, it will also follow the distortions caused by objects with big mass. One way of thinking about this is to consider two children, one heavier...

...Universities of Cambridge and Oxford have developed a sound-based method to move back through the family tree of languages that stem from PIE. They can simulate how certain words would have sounded when they were spoken 8,000 years ago. Remarkably, at the heart of the technology is the statistics of shape. “Sounds have shape,” explains Professor John Aston, from...

...universal experience of human frailties? Whatever the reason for their lasting fascination, we all have fears and we all know what it is to be fearful. Academics are no exceptions to this harsh rule but in 2013 I had had enough of fear. I wanted to get to know about it and understand it. So, I began to read about the things that frighten us. Although I looked at lots of...

...University APL/SWRI Pluto was embraced as the solar system’s ninth planet upon discovery by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930. He’d been looking for a planet where faulty data suggested a planet-sized body was perturbing the orbit of Neptune. This, he felt, was it – and the world agreed. Pluto’s mass was at first thought to be roughly the same as the Earth’s, but by 1948...