CATEGORIES

ARE WE IN A CHAOTIC UNIVERSE?

Do we finally have a handle on chaos theory and how it influences the world around us?

André Kuipers "Everybody in the space world was watching"

The only Dutch astronaut to fly into space twice, Kuipers also berthed a private spacecraft with the ISS for the first time

Grave insights

BRENNA HASSETT recommends an account of life and individual deaths - in Britain during the first millennium AD

Raised by wolves

Feral children have fascinated and frightened people for centuries, raising questions about what it means to be human. Richard Sugg shares the stories of some of these wild children - and explains why their return to society was not always a happy one

Medieval Christians were capable of imagining goddess-like beings that looked thoroughly pagan

RONALD HUTTON talks to Rhiannon Davies about his new book exploring four female deities who straddled the pagan and Christian worlds in the Middle Ages

The final slog

TAYLOR DOWNING salutes an account of the often overlooked last days of the Second World War in Europe, when Allied troops faced stubborn resistance from German forces

Generating fear

STEPHEN WALKER gives a nervous welcome to a history of nuclear power, which focuses on the accidents and the disasters that have plagued the sector

First letters

LANGUAGE

A cultural institution

Mixing music with drama and the ancient with the cutting-edge, the BBC's Third Programme set out to scale the shining peaks of "high culture". But, says DAVID HENDY, its lofty aims alienated as much as they allured

A congregation of voices

SARAH FOOT enjoys a new history of the Church of England, a book that finds space for the reflections of ordinary parishioners as well charting the deeds of the great and the good

All at sea

Maritime

EILEEN COLLINS: “IT WAS A DIFFICULT MISSION… WE WERE THE FIRST TO SEE MIR”

Having served as both the first female pilot and first female commander of NASA’s Space Shuttle, Eileen Collins boosted the involvement of women in space exploration to a whole new level

EUROPE'S MARS ROVER IS NOW UNLIKELY TO LAUNCH BEFORE 2026 AFTER RUSSIA'S WAR ON UKRAINE

Europe's beleaguered ExoMars rover is unlikely to launch before 2026 as the European Space Agency (ESA) ponders a path forward for the mission, including finding a new rocket, replacing Russian-built parts in cooperation with NASA or restarting its partnership with Russia in case the country's war in Ukraine ends soon.

WHERE HAVE THESE GIANT FILAMENTS COME FROM?

Mysterious magnetic filaments have been found at the heart of the Milky Way, but astronomers are still trying to discover their origin

25 UNBELIEVABLE FACTS ABOUT THE SOLAR SYSTEM

WHY OUR NEIGHBOURHOOD COULD BE THE STRANGEST PLACE IN THE COSMOS

VIRGIN ORBIT TARGETS SUMMER FOR ITS FIRST ORBITAL LAUNCH

The California-based company has three straight successful orbital missions under its belt

WELCOME TO THE STELLAR AFTERLIFE

They’re hot, they’re small and technically they’re dead. Meet the stellar remnants that have a multimillion-year-long tale to tell

BLACK HOLE BILLIARDS

Around these behemoths, smaller black holes weirdly collide

PLANET PROFILE VENUS

Earth’s sister planet is a harsh, deadly world, making it an interesting one to observe

CANON EOS 6D MARK II

Is this the perfect companion for enthusiast photographers looking to make their first break into the full-frame world?

12 ASTRONOMY TUTORIALS TO MASTER

For the very best views of the night sky

Feather beds, cockfights and midnight flights to the moon

From seeing feathers as omens of death to saving soldiers with homing pigeons, our interactions with birds have always been contradictory. Roy and Lesley Adkins select five chapters from avian history to illuminate this complex relationship

Gods among men

JANE DRAYCOTT applauds an ambitious journey through the global history of emperors, from the most ancient civilisations to the 20th-century demise of world-spanning realms

EMPIRE OF THE GREATS

Not even a 2,000-year smear campaign, instigated by the Greeks, can obscure the staggering achievements of the ancient Persians. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones tells the story of the Iranian dynasty that forged the greatest empire the world had ever known

Jesse Owens 1913-80

He was a bit of a showman and even raced against horses for money. When asked why, he said: You can't eat four gold medals'

Spinning stories

HELEN CARR assesses a magisterial overview of how people have represented the past, from medieval propaganda to historical fiction

The family behind the Tudors

The name Tudor has reverberated down the centuries, but another family lurked in the background, helping the dynasty to greatness - and sometimes seeking to tear it down. Joanne Paul chronicles the meteoric rise and deadly fall of the Dudleys

Voyage into the unknown

MARGARET SMALL commends a new biography of Ferdinand Magellan that looks beyond the Portuguese explorer's globe-circling achievements to reveal the man behind the myth

Victoria Drummond Engineering trailblazer

A century ago, the barriers facing any woman longing for a career in marine engineering seemed almost insurmountable - but not quite. JO STANLEY introduces a woman who had the talent, bravery and determination to make her mark in the male-dominated maritime world

This will be seen as a hybrid war, in which a key weapon is the deliberate misreading of history

In February, following months of escalating tensions, Russia invaded Ukraine. Are parallels with the past useful in making sense of the war, or is history being used for more sinister ends? Four experts have their say