Stephen Dowling

Great hammerheads are odd-looking and mysterious creatures, but scientists may have found the first ever nursery for these enormous sharks.

The asteroid Bennu could one day collide with Earth – and is a time capsule from the Solar System’s early days. Nasa’s Osiris-Rex mission has captured it in stunning detail.

Sharks were long thought to have poor eyesight, but recent research is revealing new insights into their ability to see colours and if they can distinguish prey from people.

There’s a lot that can go wrong on a rocket launch. Over the decades, however, the failure rate has been surprisingly consistent.

The world’s first solar power station was built before World War One, created by a man with a vision for cleaner air.

The massive thrust needed to launch a rocket into space creates a lot of noise. With the launch of SpaceX’s enormous Starship rocket, how loud did it get?

New Zealand’s remarkable birdlife evolved on a land without apex predators. Introduced cats have decimated their numbers. New Zealanders may have to change the way they keep cats.

Plastic is a staple of modern kitchens, but it comes with a frustrating problem – it doesn’t dry properly in a dishwasher. Why?

In the 1960s, a chef in Canada created a pizza topping that swept the world. So why is it so widely loved – and hated?

The space race – rockets, satellites, record-breaking cosmonauts – was a way for Soviet artists to adopt avant-garde ideas under the cloak of propaganda.

HMS Challenger spent three-and-a-half years peering into some of the remotest parts of our world’s oceans. Its groundbreaking voyage still has an impact today.

Eighty years ago, a small single-seat fighter was largely responsible for defeating Germany’s attempts to invade Britain. But it wasn’t the Spitfire.

Fountain pens were a stylish statement but messy and impractical. Their replacement was a stroke of design genius perfectly in time for the era of mass production.

Some vegan pet owners don’t just want to give up animal products – they want their pets to as well. But can cats and dogs really go meat free?

How a teenager’s brainchild, launched twenty years ago, revolutionised the way we consume music and almost brought the industry to its knees

It took nearly five years into the internet’s life before anyone made a concerted effort to archive it. Much of our earliest online activity has disappeared.

Our cats may purr when we pet and tickle them, but it’s a much more complicated form of communication than we’ve assumed.

The story of Britain’s de Havilland Comet, the world’s first jet airliner, which heralded a new age of flying.

In 1956, Cessna started building the 172 training plane - and more than 60 years on, it’s still in production. Stephen Dowling looks at the reasons why it’s still so popular.

In 1957, a British jet bomber flew higher than any aircraft before it. Nearly 60 years later, engineers are attempting to get this historic aircraft back in the air.