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  From - BBC News  By -  Clare McHugh  Edited by - Amal Udawatta National Portrait Gallery With her award-winning Wolf Hall series of books, Hilary Mantel made sympathetic a figure long considered a historical bad guy. But as Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, the TV adaptation of her third and final novel, premieres in the US, the question is: did she also 'sidestep crucial matters'? Nearly 500 years after his death, Thomas Cromwell lives again, reborn in the popular imagination thanks to novelist Hilary Mantel, and her Wolf Hall trilogy. For decades, historians piled layer after layer of interpretation upon Henry VIII's astute chief minister, a key figure in the Reformation, when King Henry broke from the Catholic Church to establish his own Church of England. But now, with the emergence of Mantel's fictional Cromwell – so attractive, so splendidly presented – the real man is in danger of being buried forever. Going forward, Cromwell's name will likely call to m...

     From - Sky & Telescope By - AAA Nova  Edited by - Amal Udawatta Artist's impression of the view from one of the planets orbiting Barnard's Star. International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/R. Proctor/J. Pollard Following decades of disproven claims, four small exoplanets have been confirmed to orbit Barnard’s Star, the second-closest star system to Earth after Alpha Centauri. System Under Scrutiny Just 6 light-years away, Barnard’s Star is a well-studied 10-billion-year-old M dwarf with a mass of 0.16 solar mass. Finding exoplanets around Barnard’s Star has been something of a white whale for astronomers for more than half a century; starting in the 1960s, researchers have claimed to have spotted various planets around Barnard’s Star, from distant Jupiter-mass companions to close-in super-Earths. Each of these claims has been refuted. Illustration of the nearest star systems to Earth. Barnard's Star is the nearest single star and second-nearest star sy...

  From - Live Science By  Victoria Atkinson   Edited by - Amal Udawatta Irrational numbers go on and on. How do we know that pi has no ending?   (Image credit: kr7ysztof/Getty Images) Are there mathematical ways to prove that pi is an irrational number that has no end? Originally defined as the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter,  pi  — written as the Greek letter π — appears throughout mathematics, including in areas that are completely unconnected to circles such as chemistry, physical sciences and medicine. Pi belongs to a huge mathematical group called irrational numbers, which go on forever and cannot be written as fractions. Scientists have calculated pi to  105 trillion digits , although most of us are more familiar with the approximation 3.14. But how do we know that pi is an irrational number? Rational numbers, which make up the majority of numbers we use in day-to-day life (although less than half of all possible num...