Amy Arthur

1 week ago | skyatnightmagazine.com | Amy Arthur

Fire can’t start in the vacuum of space, as there is no oxygen available for combustion. They can, however, start inside a spacecraft or space station that has oxygenated air for passengers. Any fire in space would look and behave differently than the lit candles on your birthday cake back at home, though, and that’s down to gravity. The typical teardrop shape of a burning candle on Earth is caused by the effects of gravity. Hotter air is less dense, so it rises to the top of a flame in a peak.

2 weeks ago | skyatnightmagazine.com | Amy Arthur

Space is… big. Any story that involves characters traversing it needs to come up with a way to address the vast distances between galaxies. There are a few ways that sci-fi writers get around this problem of moving their protagonists from one point in space to another, including teleportation, wormholes and faster-than-light travel.

3 weeks ago | skyatnightmagazine.com | Amy Arthur

Most great explosions that happen in space-based science fiction movies are accompanied by an almighty ‘ka-boom!’, but you already know that this is only possible in Hollywood space. In reality, an explosion in space would be deathly silent. On Earth, the most damaging part of an explosion is the shock wave it creates in the air.

2 months ago | skyatnightmagazine.com | Amy Arthur

There have been some memorable fight scenes in space science fiction over the years, but how many of them are an accurate representation of how the struggle would play out in microgravity? Let’s look first at one-on-one combat. We don’t see many fights between individuals wearing bulky spacesuits, which makes sense, given they would hinder movement. It probably wouldn’t make for a very engaging action scene. So we’ll assume we’re talking about a fight inside, where the air is oxygenated.

Nov 25, 2024 | sciencefocus.com | Amy Arthur

On average, a person with a womb will menstruate once every 28 days, for 40 years of their life. Menstruation isn’t just about blood: period pain is extremely common – 84 per cent have painful periods regularly – and it can be so severe that people miss days of education or work every month. Periods are also expensive, with the average lifetime cost estimated to be £4,800 (about $6,100). It’s understandable, then, that you might want to stop having periods.