Can we map The Odyssey? How ancient geographers and modern researchers have traced Odysseus’s travels
Attempts to transpose the locations of The Odyssey accurately to modern maps have proved difficult.
The Conversation
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Science
Research, discovery and the natural world — from the cosmos to the cell.
74 stories
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The James Webb telescope: what it has actually changed
Webb's real legacy is not imagery but overturned assumptions: galaxies too big and too bright barely 300 million years after the Big Bang…
Amelia Hart
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How forensic DNA evidence actually works in court
A courtroom DNA 'match' is a statistical statement about how rare a profile is, not proof that a named person committed a crime, and…
Amelia Hart
Nuclear fusion versus fission: why the clean giant is always thirty years away
Fusion's celebrated ignition results measure energy at the plasma, not the plug, and the gulf between those two numbers explains why…
Amelia Hart
How new elements get made and named
Superheavy elements are forged one atom at a time by slamming ion beams into rare actinide targets, then survive milliseconds before…
Amelia Hart
How tides actually work: the Moon is only half the story
The textbook picture of two lunar bulges cannot explain real tides: they are resonant waves sloshing in ocean basins, which is why the…
Amelia Hart
How earthquakes are measured and why magnitude is not damage
Moment magnitude records the energy released at the fault on a logarithmic scale, but depth, soil conditions and building codes decide the…
Amelia Hart
What DNA ancestry kits can and cannot tell you
The ancestry percentages in a home DNA kit are statistical estimates made by comparing your markers against reference panels, not a fixed…
Amelia Hart
How weather forecasts are made and why day ten is fiction
Forecasts are built by assimilating millions of observations into physics models run dozens of times on supercomputers, and chaos theory…
Amelia Hart