Almost 40 years since the explosion, the ecosystem around Chernobyl is unlike anywhere else

Astronauts in cryosleep is one of science fiction's most enduring fantasies – but a new study suggests the gap between fiction and reality just got a little smaller

Calorie counting isn’t just difficult, it’s riddled with problems that make it practically useless for anyone trying to lose weight. But there are alternatives

Stephen Hawking spent much of his life pulling at a thread, one that had been swallowed by a black hole. He was interested in what happened to material once it passed a black hole’s event horizon – the point of no return, where gravity crushes anything that crosses it into an infinitesimally small point in space. Other theories hypothesise that if you fell in, your atoms would become part of this cosmic monster and reside there until the end of time. Hawking’s maths suggested something else, however. According to his calculations, black holes don’t last until the end of time. In fact, quantum mechanics suggests that a black hole would, over time, fizz away. Its particles would evaporate over aeons until a final, massive burst of energy. Why does this matter? Well, until this point, the prevailing idea in physics was that nothing is ever really destroyed. If we could somehow fish your atoms out of a black hole, and invent a machine that knew where to put them (like your pattern caught in a transporter buffer), we could, in theory, rebuild you. The death of a black hole, and the ultimate end of everything within it, seemed to violate this rule. Hawking had spotted a crack in our model of the Universe. The resolution to this problem that he settled on, after many intellectual battles with other theoretical physicists, was the ‘holographic principle’ (an idea first proposed by physicists Gerard ‘t Hooft and Leonard Susskind). It’s a headscratcher of an idea that suggests the Universe is actually a projection. In this issue, Thomas Hertog, one of Hawking’s closest science collaborators, takes a closer look at this idea. He thinks that we’re close to a discovery that will let us see Hawking’s maths play out in the real world. A discovery that could finally move us closer to a single, unified theory of everything.

The Maya civilisation is known for its art and architecture. But as we decipher their surviving cultural relics, we’re discovering Maya astronomy was even more advanced than we had imagined

Forget fine lines. Could Botox give you an unexpected mental health tweakment?

Palantir has become one of the most influential and least understood tech companies on the planet. As its reach spreads, so do questions about how its tools work and who they ultimately serve

The effects of alcohol extend beyond a sore head the next day