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40,085 articles from Guardian Unlimited Science

Chasing Venus: the Race to Measure the Heavens – review

Andrea Wulf's stirring history of Venus-gazing shows astronomy at its most adventurous and heroicIt is the things one has not done that one regrets, they say. A debatable proposition, but I now have one more regret to add to the list: that I did not make any effort to see the transit of Venus across the sun's face last year. There had been one eight years before, you see, and I was getting blase;...

In praise of ... Kurt Schwitters | Editorial

A Tate Britain exhibition celebrates the German dadaist whose influence can be traced to Damien HirstNowadays, it seems, everyone knows the art of Kurt Schwitters. The German dadaist is honoured everywhere as one of the key modernists. His aesthetic principle of "the combination for artistic purposes of all conceivable materials" has become orthodoxy and can be followed directly to the work of...


MONDAY 28. JANUARY 2013


Nick Martin obituary

As he was a quiet man, only those closest to my husband, Nick Martin, who has died from a brain tumour aged 55, knew of his two great passions: art and his family.Perhaps Nick's fascination with art began when, at the age of eight, he witnessed an older friend painting a landscape in which she coloured one of the trees completely red. This puzzled and impressed him, and the memory stayed. As a...

Iran launches monkey into space

Kavoshgar rocket reached height of more than 75 miles and 'returned its shipment intact', news agency reportsIran has launched a live monkey into space, the Fars news agency reported, lauding it as an advance in a missile and space programme that has alarmed the west and Israel.There was no independent confirmation and there have been no announcements by western powers of any Iranian launch late...