Antarctic species don't just include the charismatic marine animals, such as killer whales, penguins and seals. There is actually a whole range of purely land-based animals and plants that spend their whole life-cycle on the frozen continent. These include moss and lichen, microbes and many... click to read more

Recently we have found that our oceans are full of microscopic "body-snatchers" that are important members of the ocean's food-web. The base of marine ecology rests upon the microscopic plankton. The origin of the term plankton is from the Greek word πλαγκτός meaning "I drift (myself)".... click to read more

Space-based observatories such as the Hubble Space Telescope are providing valuable insights into the atmospheres of planets outside our solar system, known as "exoplanets". We have recently used Hubble to uncover the most compelling evidence to date for a stratosphere layer on one such exoplanet,... click to read more

Roughly half of all stars are in multiple systems (binaries, triples etc), which means that two or more stars orbit each other because of their mutual gravitational pull. For stars of about the mass and age of the Sun, the average separation between companion stars... click to read more

A warming Arctic is causing reductions in sea ice thickness and increasing its drift speed. Compositional and dynamic changes in sea ice could have impacts on the ability of ice-dependent vertebrates to acquire and amass energy needed for maintenance, growth, and reproduction. Knowledge of how... click to read more