Science

As the year moves forward, curiosity is building around the last solar eclipse of 2025. Like always, these celestial events attract attention from both scientists and skywatchers– and this one’s no exception. From researchers to those who follow age-old beliefs, many are eager to know what to expect from the second and final solar eclipse of the year.Here’s everything we …

Scientists have long grappled with a fundamental question: what exactly is light? Is it a wave, flowing like ripples across water, or is it made up of tiny particles, like miniature paintballs zipping through space? This fundamental question was at the heart of the double-slit experiment, demonstrating light’s dual nature. Just recently, physicists at MIT conducted an experiment using incredible …

The coelacanth is known as a “living fossil” because its anatomy has changed little in the last 65 million years. Despite being one of the most studied fish in history, it continues to reveal new information that could transform our understanding of vertebrate evolution. This is revealed in a study published in the journal Science Advances by researchers from the …

Paleontologists in Patagonia, Argentina, have unearthed a portion of a postcranial skeleton that belonged to a previously unknown rebbachisaurid sauropod dinosaur. Life reconstruction of Astigmasaura genuflexa. Image credit: Mattia Yuri Messina. The newly-discovered dinosaur lived in what is now Argentina during the Late Cretaceous epoch, approximately 95 million years ago. Scientifically named Astigmasaura genuflexa, the species was about 18 m …

Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it’s investigating the financials of Elon Musk’s pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, ‘The A Word’, which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know …

When scientists discover new prehistoric species, the fossils alone fail to conjure the creature in the flesh. It’s impossible to summon the entirety ancient shark from a single tooth, or some weird old rodent from a fragment of a jaw. This is where paleoart comes in, with illustrations that help you imagine how such an animal might have looked in …

Paleontologists say they have discovered the 76-million-year-old footprints of a ceratopsian dinosaur-dominated herd in Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada. The discovery provides the first evidence of mixed-species herding behavior in dinosaurs, similar to how modern wildebeest and zebra travel together on the African plains. A herd of ceratopsians (Styracosaurus albertensis) accompanied by an ankylosaur (Euplocephalus tutus) walk through an …

In a stunning display, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) recently captured a lightning storm illuminating the skies above Singapore. The image, taken during the station’s orbit over Southeast Asia, shows intense bursts of light flickering through cloud cover in the region. What is it? The ISS sits in low Earth orbit, providing a unique vantage point for observing …

Spain has offered to spend up to €400 million ($471 million) to host the Thirty Meter Telescope, an enormous observatory project facing imminent cancellation due to U.S. budget constraints. If Spain strikes a deal, the TMT would be built on La Palma in the Canary Islands rather than on Mauna Kea, a mountain in Hawaii. In 2016, La Palma became …

Lightning has long terrified and fascinated scientists and non-scientists alike. For something so relatively common, the precise atmospheric events that give rise to a lightning strike have been shrouded in mystery, but new research is offering some tantalizing clues. A team of engineers and meteorologists believe they’ve cracked the curious case of how lightning forms in the cloudtops, and their …