Hearing ordered in death
Seniors falling behind
Swift signs repurposed
'Horrible' crash kills four
Officers won't be charged
MAID cases on the rise
Impeachment attempt
FBI director to resign 
Wildfire grows overnight
Body Shop to be sold 
Real estate to pick up: BoC
Facebook, Instagram issues
Bill Belichick is back
World Cup hosts named
Warrior off to prospect game
Infowars purchase rejected
Elton still 'body conscious'
Paul Mescal selling clothes
Skywatching
Telling aliens where we are
An alien spacecraft coming into the Solar System would have no trouble finding us. All they would need is a radio. For more than a century, we have been...
Binoculars for Christmas
The range of things available to backyard astronomers is now, er, astronomical. Choosing presents for the family astronomer is more complicated than ever. That...
Oxygen on Mars
The most powerful tool we have for searching for life on other worlds is to look for its chemical signatures in their atmospheres. There are chemicals that are...
Underground astronomy
We put our radio telescopes in valleys that screen them from manmade interference, but where there is a good view of the sky. Our optical telescopes get put in...
The universe has a skeleton
We have known about Dark Matter and Dark Energy for at least a decade, but, as yet, still have no idea what they are. To make the issue worse, these two...
Mercury transiting the sun
On Remembrance Day, Mercury, the closest known planet to the sun, will cross the solar disc. Observers will see a small, round disc move slowly across the sun...
Double star on Luke's world
There is a scene in the first Star Wars movie where, on the desert planet Tatooine, Luke Skywalker watches the setting of twin suns. Was this scene realistic?...
When is the moon full?
If you have never watched the full moon rising above the hills on the other side of a lake, you really need to do something about that. It is beautiful and...
Saturn is the moon king
Researchers using the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii have found 20 more moons orbiting Saturn. This brings the total orbiting the planet to 82, overtaking Jupiter,...
Black holes shred stars
The term "tidal disruption event" or TDE must be one of the biggest cosmic euphemisms around. This is what we say is happening when a star is being...
Visitors from beyond
Every year, we can count on a comet or two visiting our neighbourhood in the solar system. For a few weeks these objects can be the most spectacular objects in...
A warm, wet world
Bizarre exoplanets — planets orbiting other stars — are interesting in that they help us understand how planetary systems form and how they work....
A world of extremes
Hal Clement, a well-known science fiction writer, had a very particular story theme. He imagined bizarre worlds with extreme conditions, such as gravitational...
Heating up the Earth
If, on a clear, sunny day you hold up a one-metre-square, flat piece of black cardboard to the sun, the cardboard will rapidly become very hot. That is because...
Mission to Europa
When the Voyager spacecraft sent back the first close-up images of Jupiter's moon Europa, we all had a shock. It looked nothing like what we expected. Until...
Flashes from the sky
Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are among the most puzzling things in modern astronomy. From some place in the sky, there is a sudden flash of radio emission,...
Search for aliens
On page 190 of the Observer's Book of Astronomy, published in 1962, author Patrick Moore wrote about Mars: "The planet cannot be regarded as...
Star light, stars very bright
During clear evenings at this time of year, almost overhead you'll see the bright, bluish star Vega. Now, scan westward to find the bright, orange star...
Earth having meteor shower
We are about to pass through a stream of meteoric material once again. Most of it is made up of dust and sand grain sized particles of rock or ice, but there...
Dark matter is everywhere
An unfortunate thing about science is that important discoveries take a long time to hatch. They can be utterly ignored for decades, until a new discovery makes...
