Stephen Battersby

Going: round in circles

Poor Pluto was demoted, but could it be returned triumphantly to full planet status? Stephen Battersby sizes things up

Strange skies: Mighty air tides

Tides in our ocean of air have surprising power, reaching down to trigger landslips and up into space to jam radio links and snare satellites

Milky Way mysteries: Antimatter factory

Our galaxy produces 10 billion tonnes of antimatter every second. What could be pumping out so many positrons?

How a 3000-year-old code unmasked a stellar cannibal

The inner life of one mysteriously winking cosmic object might have been explained – thanks to an ancient Egyptian papyrus

Understanding auroras, the greatest show on Earth

What causes these most inspiring of natural phenomena? A flotilla of NASA satellites is finally providing the answers

Now that's what I call boring

Some of the greatest scientific advances have come off the back of experiments that were dull in the extreme

Nanotubes outshine platinum as fuel-cell catalysts

Fuel cells could become smaller, more efficient and cheaper thanks to the discovery that carbon nanotubes could replace the expensive platinum catalysts that the cells rely on

The next supercontinent

The formation of a new mega land mass is just a matter of geological time. But what will it look like, asks Stephen Battersby

Right to silence

Battersby explains how radio astromers adopt mobile phones, GPS receivers, CCTVs wireless broadband connections and all manner of other stuff, fracturing the once-pristine airwaves into a crazy cacophony. Harvey Liszt works at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Virginia, and he knows the problems this causes. His kind need pin-drop quiet to detect emissions from across the cosmos, produced by interstellar molecules that might be early stages in the emergence of life, or clouds of hydrogen that will soon form stars, or giant galaxies where black holes generate plumes of hot gas.

The unseen agent

People live in the age of information. They are surrounded by it, and more of it year by year. Recently came the most startling demonstration yet: a tiny machine powered purely by information, which chilled metal through the power of its knowledge. This seemingly magical device could put us on the road to new, more efficient nanoscale machines, a better understanding of the workings of life, and a more complete picture of perhaps our most fundamental theory of the physical world. Here, Battersby reports Maxwells demon, a thought experiment created by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell in which he suggested how the Second Law of Thermodynamics could hypothetically be violated