This patch of sky holds some of the youngest stars ever found. The ribbon that runs through the centre of the image is made up of dust clouds in the constellation Orion, which holds one of the busiest nearby stellar nurseries. The composite image includes both infrared light at wavelengths too long for the human [...]

Today Cern is celebrating 20 years of the free, open web. We all know the World Wide Web was created in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, during his time at Cern. But did you know that it was another four years until the particle physics lab officially declared the web a free for all? On 30 [...]

On Thursday morning, the biggest solar flare of the year erupted from the sun. Shortly afterwards it was followed by a coronal mass ejection (CME) that sent tons of high energy particles hurtling towards Earth. Solar flares can affect us almost instantly. This one was no exception, causing a radio blackout. But CMEs take longer [...]

The last couple of weeks have been busy ones in my day job, because we just launched the new physics blog physicsfocus! We have a whole range of posts already up, covering topics from latest physics results, to education and science communication. You can catch up with everything from our launch week here. Readers of Basic Space [...]

Margaret Thatcher was many things – including a scientist. And, thanks to her scientific inclination, she was one of the first people to be told about the discovery of the W boson at CERN. Thatcher visited the UA1 experiment, which ran on CERN’s Super Proton Synchrotron, in August 1982. She kept her visit low-key, reportedly asking to [...]

Astronomers have found water vapour and carbon monoxide, but no methane, in the atmosphere of an alien planet orbiting a star 129 light years away. The star, known as HR 8799, is at the centre of the first planetary system beyond our solar system to be imaged directly, in 2008. The star has at least [...]

Chances are, unless you’ve been lucky enough to see them in person, you will have seen the northern lights in a time lapse video online. But have you ever seen them just as they would play out in real life? Kai-Marius Pedersen is a northern lights hunter who records videos of real time aurora. No distracting [...]

…as long as you’re part of an older, married couple with amazing mechanical skills, great long term resilience, and relaxed attitude towards being exposed to high levels of radiation. Storify of today’s Inspiration Mars press conference: [View the story "Want to go to Mars? Dennis Tito will take you there" on Storify] Want to go [...]

Still looking for an extra special Valentine’s gift for tomorrow? Here’s something truly out-of-this-world… Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Overnight Scentsation. This miniature rose was grown in space, on NASA’s Space Shuttle Discovery Flight STS-95, in an ASTROCULTURETM commercial plant growth chamber. Scientists wanted to see whether a rose grown in space really [...]

Just over a week ago, on the second day of ScienceOnline2013, I dragged myself out of bed, onto a bus, and eventually made it to the the coffee table at the McKimmon Centre in Raleigh, North Carolina. Jetlag, combined with a couple of late nights and early mornings, had finally hit me. Without a constant [...]