September 25, 2008 Along with daughter Lucy, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking is planning to send his digitized DNA into space as part of NCsoft’s Operation Immortality. The pair hopes the exercise will help publicize the Archon X PRIZE for Genomics; a competition that will award $10 million to the first person or team that can [...]

The apparent development of a large void of some billion light-years in diameter in the Constellation Eridanus appears to be improbable given current cosmological models. A radical and controversial theory proposes that it is a “universe-in-mass black hole” rather than hypothetical dark matter responsible for the phenomenon described as the expanding-accelerating universe. This radical theory [...]

It was August 15, 1977, when astronomer Jerry Ehman was examining data coming from Ohio State University’s radio telescope, which was engaged in listening for signals from deep space, hoping to find something of intelligent origin. In a moment that’s since become one of the most famous events in astronomy, he saw a sequence of [...]

We take a look at our natural satellite’s eerie glow. Perhaps rather bizarrely, the Moon is actually very dark, and it doesn’t glow for the reasons you might think. The ancients thought that the Moon produced its own light, but we now know definitively that this is not the case. Rather, our Moon reflects the light [...]

NASA scientists have recorded the biggest ever meteorite impact on the Moon, with an explosion equal to 5 tons of TNT. The event is part of ‘lunar meteor showers’ observed by astronauts of the Moon exploration program. The 40-kg meteorite measuring 0.3 to 0.4 meters wide traveling 56,000 mph slammed through the Moon’s surface on [...]

As the only metal that is liquid at room temperature, mercury is freaky even under normal conditions. But check out what happens to a blob of the stuff when it’s exposed to a different audio frequencies. Photographer Nick Moore achieved this cymatic effect by pouring the mercury onto a concave plastic lens from an old [...]

In a Guatemalan village, residents spotted strange bright lights hovering in the sky. That same night (on the last days of August 2011), a piglet was born, different from a litter of 11. Smaller than the others and with a “human-like” head. Farmer Laureano Escobar Arias said: ‘I was shocked – it was a really [...]

Yesterday Hill was sentenced to 3 months in jail followed by three months’ home confinement after failing to pay a tax bill because she had withdrawn from society following threats to her family. In June last year, Hill posted a diatribe to her Tumblr account complaining of how the music industry is “manipulated and controlled by a media protected [...]

Scientists at the University of Missouri have devised a new way to create and control plasma that could transform American energy generation and storage. Randy Curry, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Missouri’s College of Engineering, and his team developed a device that launches a ring of plasma at distances of [...]

Shaker Aamer, photographed in 2012 at Guantanamo Bay. Photograph: Clemency Wells /Clemency.Wells@reprieve.org.uk In these poignant words from Guantánamo, Shaker Aamer reveals exclusively to the Observer the pain of being separated from his family for 12 years As of today, I’ve spent more than 11 years in Guantánamo Bay. To be precise, it’s been 4,084 long [...]