SCOTS scientists are at the vanguard of modern pioneers pushing the boundaries of the universe as we know it to new limits.

Modern leaders including Nobel prizewinner Professor Peter Higgs, who discovered the so-called God particle, have inspired a wave of field-leaders in a variety of scientific spheres.

Now as a goldmine on a cosmic scale has been found in a distant galaxy where experts including Professor Sheila Rowan, one of the British scientists involved and also director of the University of Glasgow’s Institute for Gravitational Research, sees a new chapter in astrophysics ahead.

She says that "nature has given us the most dazzling gift - the first gravitational wave signals from colliding neutron stars are a key that has allowed us to unlock the door to answer several long-standing mysteries".

“One of these ... is the puzzle of where some of the gold and other heavy elements in the cosmos have come from.

“We now believe that the violent collision of neutron stars could be a gold factory.”

It may sound like something out of a science fiction plot, but Scotland's chief scientific adviser is currently hunting for ripples in the fabric of the spacetime continuum.

Professor Rowan's team recently discovered a burst of gravitational waves created by two black holes colliding which caused the entire universe to shudder.

The ripple in spacetime began 1.8 billion years ago and originated so far away that it wasn't picked up until August.

Her team, based at labs at the University of Glasgow, is now trying to zero in on the precise location of the cataclysmic event so they can learn more about how our universe came into being. Rowan is the chief scientific adviser (CSA) for Scotland, providing expert advice to the Scottish Government to help inform policymaking.

The 47-year-old from Dumfries also in partnership with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a large-scale physics experiment and observatory set up to detect cosmic gravitational waves.

The ripple of scientific discovery continued as Glasgow University recently paid tribute to the work of one of its former scientists after three of his colleagues were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.

Professor Ron Drever, who died in March this year, helped lay the foundations of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo) which helped lead to the detection of gravitational waves.

Mr Drever, who had dementia, passed away less than 18 months after his colleagues announced the successful search for elusive ripples in space-time.

The announcement in February 2016 that tremors in the fabric of reality had been traced to the titanic collision of two black holes was widely tipped to be a Nobel Prize winner.

In another breakthrough, scientists from three Scottish universities have grown three-dimensional bone cells in the laboratory in a development that could help transform the lives of patients.

It is hoped the discovery could in future be used to replace or repair damaged sections of bone, helping patients including landmine victims.

The researchers, from the universities of Glasgow, Strathclyde, the West of Scotland and Galway, hope the new technique will prevent the problem of rejection.

Scientists have already used bone-growing technology to save a dog's leg from amputation and hope to begin human trials in around three years' time.

Matthew Dalby, professor of cell engineering at University of Glasgow, is one of the lead authors of their paper, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.