In a cave on the Italian side of the Slovenian border, one layer of earth holds the remains of the first farmers. The layer right below it belongs to the hunters who lived there before them. The cave is called Tina Jama. It opens near the summit of Mount Lanaro/Volnik, in the municipality of Sgonico/Zgonik, […]

For more than three centuries, astronomers asking whether the Solar System is stable have received ever more comforting answers. Isaac Newton was not so sure. He suspected that the mutual tugs between Jupiter and Saturn would eventually wreck the planetary order, and that only divine intervention could prevent it. By the late 1700s, Laplace and […]

The Great Sphinx has been without a nose for centuries. Now a fossil crocodile skull taken from the same rock turns out to be missing the tip of its snout too. The coincidence has put a name on a species science did not know it had, Herugavialis cairensis, which spent almost a hundred years in […]

In 2017 the director Christopher Nolan brought Dunkirk back to cinema screens with Dunkirk, a film about the hurried and agonising retreat of the Allied armies from the European mainland in 1940. The German advance through France had been unstoppable, and the Second World War was only months old. That evacuation is the best-known episode […]