Scottish whisky sent into space three years ago in an experiment looking at the impact of gravity on how it matures will return to Earth next month. The Ardbeg distillery on Islay sent compounds of unmatured malt to the International Space Station in an unmanned cargo spacecraft in October 2011,

After decades of searching scientists have discovered that a vast reservoir of water, enough to fill the Earth’s oceans three times over, may be trapped hundreds of miles beneath the surface, potentially transforming our understanding of how the planet was formed. The water is locked up in a

A class of materials that has quickly become the rising star of the solar cell world could enable production of hydrogen fuel using sunlight. Michael Grätzel, a chemist at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, and colleagues built a photovoltaic device using cheap and abundant

Scientists searching for a way to predict earthquakes have uncovered the most promising lead yet, after uncovering tell-tale chemical spikes in groundwater up to six months before tremors struck. Major earthquakes can kill hundreds of thousands of people, as in Haiti in 2010, but they are the only

We know a lot about the world around us. We know a lot about ourselves and how we work. We even know where babies come from, and this is no mean feat. Imagine it's 350BC, and you're trying to work it out, with no textbooks, and no microscopes. If you're clever, you'll suspect that it has something