Carl Sagan

The great US astronomer Carl Sagan described Venus as the planet in our solar system most like hell. But he also suggested some 50 years ago that it m(...)

If you could start with a clean slate today what public holidays would you create? New Year’s Day marks the beginning of the Gregorian calendar but w(...)

“What would you call them?” artist Niall Sweeney says early in our conversation. The question is rhetorical, but borne of an inability to describe the(...)

Reports suggest committed belief in pseudo-scientific bottom-water of the brownest hue is enjoying yet another revival. The word “committed” is import(...)

Physicist Ana Alonso-Serrano has spent much of her career thinking about what’s inside a black hole, an object which the world only caught a first gli(...)

If Professor Brian Cox picks up a rock, it’s time to listen. Not because he’s the threatening type, of course, but because it means he’s employing ite(...)

In June 1977, four days after the death of Elvis, the first of two Voyager space probes were launched. More than 40 years later, Voyager 1 and 2 are s(...)

The late Carl Sagan was a bit of a ham. But he was our ham. He was a ham for humanism and logical thinking. At the end of Emer Reynolds’s splendid new(...)

Two years ago Australian artist Patricia Piccinini populated the main gallery at the Galway International Arts Festival with oddly loveable creatures (...)

Prof Brian Cox is on the stage in the Olympia and behind him there is a photograph taken by Nasa’s Curiosity rover on Mars, in which Earth appears as (...)