Footage released by Nasa shows a view of Hurricane Ian that can be seen from the International Space Station as it flies over the storm. Hurricane Ian moved near the Cayman Islands and closer to western Cuba early on Monday on course to hit Florida as a major hurricane this week. A surge of up to 2.4 metres (8ft) of ocean water and 25cm (10in) of rain, with as much as 38cm (15in) in...
Pianist Susan Tomes passes on advice that she received from a psychotherapist to chase away dreaded earworms Tim Harrison asks for tips on how to get rid of certain music playing on an endless loop in his brain (Letters, 25 September). I once developed a bad case of music-looping after recording an album of jolly 1920s syncopated piano music. The resulting sleeplessness got so bad that I consulted...
The Dart mission’s ‘planetary defense’ experiment hopes to test whether an Armageddon-style impact could be avertedAn unprecedented and long-awaited deep-space venture will take place almost 7m miles from Earth on Monday night when a Nasa spacecraft will be deliberately crashed into an asteroid in an attempt to show humanity can avert an Armageddon-style impact to Earth.Here’s what’s...
Experiment aims to determine if intentionally crashing spacecraft into an asteroid is an effective way to change its courseA multimillion-dollar spacecraft will collide head-on with an asteroid the size of a football stadium in an unprecedented full-scale planetary defense test by the US space agency Nasa on Monday evening.The 570kg (1257lb) spacecraft named Dart – short for Double Asteroid...
Put any biases aside and you might just become a ‘superforecaster’From Nostradamus to Paul the “psychic” octopus, who supposedly foresaw the results of World Cup matches, there has been no shortage of people who argue they – or their animals – are able to predict the future. In most cases it’s easy to dismiss such claims, be they incredibly vague, biblical-sounding prophecies (as...
In private, many physicists admit they do not believe the particles they are paid to search for exist – they do it because their colleagues are doing itImagine you go to a zoology conference. The first speaker talks about her 3D model of a 12-legged purple spider that lives in the Arctic. There’s no evidence it exists, she admits, but it’s a testable hypothesis, and she argues that a mission...
I’ve started talking to household objects – and none of us are enjoying what we’re hearingThere has been a flurry of debate about whether people do or do not have an inner monologue. What none of us has, really, is an adequate vocabulary to explain what goes on in our heads, or convey it to others. We can’t grasp how others experience their inner lives, just as we can’t know what they...
Hidden hieroglyphics could suggest the king is buried within a much larger structure housing the Egyptian queenThe discovery of hidden hieroglyphics within Tutankhamun’s tomb lends weight to a theory that the fabled Egyptian queen Nefertiti lies in a hidden chamber adjacent to her stepson’s burial chamber, a world-renowned British Egyptologist has said.Nicholas Reeves, a former curator in the...
Constellation’s brightest star, Altair, gives out 11 times more light than our sunThe celestial eagle is in full flight at this time of the year for the northern hemisphere.The constellation of Aquila is one of the 48 constellations defined by Ptolemy in the 2nd century, though it had been mentioned in Greek tradition as long ago as the 4th century BC by Eudoxus. In mythology, Aquila represents...