World

Dubai has long attracted a particular kind of entrepreneur, people willing to gamble on a fast-moving city still building its identity in real time. Over the past two decades, the emirate’s skyline has become crowded with developers, financiers, and hospitality figures who arrived with modest beginnings and left fingerprints on entire districts. Among the newer…

A 13-year-old boy has died after getting into difficulty while swimming at a reservoir in West Yorkshire during the Bank Holiday heatwave, police confirmed on Tuesday.Emergency services rushed to Leadbeater Dam on Lumb Lane in Halifax at around 3.20pm on Monday after reports that the teenager was struggling in the water. The boy was later…

Range anxiety, the creeping fear that your electric vehicle will run out of charge before you reach your destination, remains one of the biggest psychological barriers to EV adoption worldwide. Current electric vehicles can travel around 700 kilometres on a single charge, a number that engineers and battery scientists have been trying to push past…

As Britain swelters through an intense early summer heatwave, experts are warning people against leaving electric fans running overnight, saying the popular cooling method could increase the risk of electrical fires, allergies and dehydration.The warning comes as the UK records unusually high overnight temperatures, with parts of southern England experiencing a “tropical night” after temperatures…

At first glance, the animals look frozen in time. A bird appears trapped mid-flight. A bat hangs stiffly from a branch with its wings spread wide like a gothic sculpture. Their bodies seem carved from stone rather than flesh, as though some invisible force transformed living creatures into lifeless statues. The haunting images, captured by…

The sky this week does something it only occasionally manages without fussing about it too much. A second full moon arrives inside the same calendar month, the sort of timing quirk that sounds more dramatic than it really is when you first hear it, but becomes oddly satisfying once you notice how neatly the lunar…

The music was loud, the streets were crowded and a troupe of glamorous dancers swayed through the festival in sparkling outfits and heavy makeup. To most people in the crowd, they looked like part of the entertainment. But hidden beneath the wigs, dresses and bright lipstick were undercover Thai police officers waiting for the right…

A quiet field can look completely ordinary until you notice the pattern. Many cows and deer seem to rest or graze with their bodies lined up roughly north-south. That odd detail first drew serious scientific attention in 2008, when Sabine Begall, Hynek Burda and colleagues reported that cattle and deer across many locations often followed…

For all the ambition packed into humanity’s plans for Mars colonies, lunar bases, and permanent off-world settlements, one fundamental question has quietly gone unanswered: can humans actually reproduce in space? Gravity, radiation, and microgravity-induced biological changes present obstacles that are significant and poorly understood by current science. China has now taken the most direct step…

Getting to the moon is expensive. Every kilogram of fuel that a spacecraft carries has to be lifted off Earth, which itself burns more fuel. This is why aerospace engineers and orbital mechanics researchers spend enormous amounts of time hunting for even the smallest efficiencies in how a spacecraft travels. A few meters per second…