Maybe it’s time we Homo sapiens reevaluated our relationship with the oceans of the world. It has been a good few millennia, sure, but our love affair may have been a little rushed. After all, what do we really know about the ocean? Roughly 95 percent of it remains unexplored, and it seems as if
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Very few people enjoy air travel. The chances something will go wrong are incredibly tiny, but that doesn’t mean it’s a pleasant experience. Your feet may swell up, your ears may pop, and, for some people, you may end up crying like a baby. In 2011, Virgin Atlantic conducted a study that revealed 55%
While he’s founded companies that are trying to define the future of transportation with electric vehicles, space exploration, and tunnels that would house high-speed transit systems, Elon Musk doesn’t like flying cars. During an event for his tunnel-digging company, The Boring Company, on Thursday, Musk explained why flying cars could be more trouble than
Fast Radio Bursts (FBRs) have fascinated astronomers ever since the first one was detected in 2007. This event was named the “Lorimer Burst” after it discoverer, Duncan Lorimer from West Virginia University. In radio astronomy, this phenomenon refers to transient radio pulses coming from distant cosmological sources, which typically last a few milliseconds on
Picture someone with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). You’re probably imagining a person who is easily distracted, can barely sit still, and impulsively jumps from topic to topic at a hundred miles an hour. For some people this is endearing, but for others, someone with ADHD sounds like their worst nightmare. But our preconceptions
A potato variety genetically engineered to resist potato blight can help reduce the use of chemical fungicides by up to 90 percent, according to a new study – drastically reducing the environmental impact of potato farming. Potato blight, caused by a water mould called Phytophthora infestans, can rapidly obliterate potato crops, and is one
Forget warming your morning coffee in the microwave; a laser pulse made of X-rays has set a record for heating a few microlitres of water to 100,000 degrees Celsius in 75 millionths of a billionth of a second. We wouldn’t recommend drinking the plasma, at least not without blowing on it first. But the
We all have our nightly rituals: A nightcap and a bestseller, a vigorous floss, a last compulsive scroll through Twitter. Chimpanzees, our closest genetic relatives, have their bedtime habits, too. Every evening, a chimp makes a new bed, in the literal sense, weaving branches and sticks into baskets that hang as high as 30
Hidden pages from the diary of Holocaust refugee Anne Frank have been analysed for the first time, revealing a few words of wisdom on sex, menstruation, and a handful of dirty jokes. Non-invasive imaging technology has finally allowed curators of the Anne Frank Museum to see what lay behind sheets of brown paper that had
Last week, animal control officers at the Nebraska Humane Society received an unusual call. A homeowner in Elkhorn said he had found a clump of six baby squirrels, in distress, with their tails knotted together. It all started when Craig Luttman heard screeching outside his home. When he went out to look, he found the
The practice of branding goods with their country of origin has been going on much longer than you might think – and a “Made in China”-style label etched into a 12th century piece of pottery has helped experts accurately date the cargo haul of a mysterious shipwreck. Discovered in the 1980s by a fisherman
There’s a mystery in the dusty heart of the Ant Nebula. Its two symmetrical lobes are the result of a star shedding its material as it dies – and that’s not usually a shape seen in this sort of event. One hypothesis is that the dense gas at the core of the nebula –
The Kīlauea volcano in Hawaii began causing earthquakes on Wednesday afternoon, after morning explosions of “ballistic blocks” three times larger than bowling balls. Earthquakes up to 4.4 magnitude have been measured after Kilauea’s caldera, one of its large craters, dropped 90cm causing nearby faults to move. According to the US Geological Survey (USGS), residents
Suffocating because of faeces probably ranks pretty high among the most unpleasant ways to die – but that’s exactly what happens to fish in Africa’s Mara River. Not just once, either. It happens repeatedly, and it turns out the hippos are to blame. The phenomenon was clocked when researchers noticed dead fish sometimes left
In what was once thought to be an impossible task, for the first time physicists have put a figure on the pressure inside a proton – and it’s more impressive than we could have imagined. By shooting protons with high-energy electrons, researchers have measured the push and pull of the proton’s trio of quarks,
A disturbing new video lets you watch as a Mexican red-kneed tarantula (Brachypelma smithi) literally crawls out of its skin. The 40-second time-lapse from The Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden captures the adult tarantula as it tosses and turns, spending seven long hours shedding its old exoskeleton. The Mexican red-kneed tarantula is a docile
If you thought the crisis over the gaping hole in the ozone layer was under control, prepare to be disappointed. Researchers at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have noticed an unexpected and persistent increase in ozone-destroying chemicals, called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). The Montreal Protocol, which was finalised in 1987, was a revolutionary, international
Yanny or laurel? The internet exploded in argument this week as people debated which of those words a robot was saying in this recording, which originated on Reddit and was posted on Twitter by YouTube vlogger Chloe Feldman. Hardik Kothare, who works in the speech neuroscience lab at UCSF, was quick to weigh in
The frosty vastness of Greenland might have eluded the far-reaching grasp of the Roman Empire, but that’s not to say imperial fortunes were never felt by the icy lands up north. A new study has provided a stunning, unprecedented glimpse into the peaks and valleys of ancient Roman and Greek civilisation by looking in
Astronomers using some of the most powerful telescopes on Earth have found evidence that stars were forming incredibly early on in the life of the Universe – just 250 million years after the Big Bang, well before the proverbial dust had settled. That’s when the Universe was just 2 percent of its current age
When Michael Pollan tripped on magic mushrooms for the first time, he saw himself spread out across an expansive outdoor landscape like paint. It was the best-selling author’s second stop on a three-part tour of psychedelic drugs, which Pollan describes in vivid detail in the book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science
A summary of decades of research on a rather ‘out-there’ idea involving viruses from space has recently been published, and it’s raising questions on just how scientific we can be when it comes to speculating on the history of life on Earth. It’s easy to throw around words like crackpot, rogue, and maverick in
A huge shaggy mess of unidentified sea creature has washed up in the Philippines, frightening onlookers who don’t know what to make of the giant, bedraggled carcass the ocean has deposited on their doorstep. The unspecified ‘sea monster’ has yet to be identified by authorities, so locals have taken to simply calling it the
It’s always fun when the internet goes mad over a new illusion. This time, instead of a visual illusion like the goddamn dress, we can’t stop talking about one little sound. One word pronounced in a weird robot voice is making lighting-speed rounds at the moment, creating a wave of confusion in its wake.
An asteroid the size of the Statue of Liberty is set to narrowly miss Earth on Tuesday evening. The asteroid, dubbed 2010 WC9, has come closer to our planet than any asteroid of its size has in the last 100 years. But don’t worry: at its closest, it will only reach 126,419 miles (203,000 km)
Astronomers just spotted what they think is the fastest-growing black hole ever discovered in the Universe, and it’s got a voracious appetite, sucking in the equivalent of the mass of our Sun every two days. To find this “monster” of a black hole, the researchers had to peer some 12 billion light-years across space
One of the ocean’s more mysterious jellyfish has been difficult to study because of its natural habitat in the dark depths of the ocean. But technology is opening up those depths to our curious eyes – which recently led to a 10-minute encounter with the peculiar, tentacle-less Deepstaria enigmatica. First discovered in the 1960s
Europa, a moon of Jupiter thought to harbor a warm, saltwater ocean sloshing beneath a thick, icy crust, has long been considered one of the best spots in the Solar System to look for alien beings. Now, citing data collected by NASA’s Galileo probe more than two decades ago, scientists report that giant jets
It’s called the trolley problem, and it’s all about how far you’d be willing to go to save lives in an emergency – even if it meant killing somebody. Now, scientists have tested this famous thought experiment in real life for the first time: with almost 200 human participants, caged mice, electric shocks – and
According to the current dominant theory, if there are other universes out there, they’re not likely to have life. But now an international team of researchers has demonstrated that the Multiverse is more hospitable than we thought. The Multiverse hypothesis – wherein our observable Universe is just one of many universes – is a proposed
SpaceX successfully launched Bangladesh’s first-ever geostationary communications satellite, called Bangabandhu-1, into space on Friday. But the real star of the mission was a newly designed rocket called Falcon 9 Block 5. Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, said the launcher is built to be the most powerful, reusable, and affordable version of his company’s workhorse
Sometimes mushroom hunting can yield much more than you bargain for. In the case of a forest delver in Minnesota, the discovery was straight out of a twisted tale on mutant creatures – a deceased, two-headed deer fawn. “It’s amazing and extremely rare,” says deer ecologist Gino D’Angelo of the University of Georgia, formerly
Science lovers worldwide were devastated by the news of physicist Stephen Hawking’s death in March. And it appears that the organisers of his memorial service are not excluding anyone, even those born in the future. Hawking’s funeral already took place back on March 31 in Cambridge, but now it’s time for the final farewell –
The dangers of building a home on the skirt of an active volcano have become quite clear in recent days, as residents in Hawaii have needed to evacuate from neighborhoods around Kīlauea to avoid the lava flows and toxic gases that have emerged from numerous fissures. But the advancing molten rock – and the
When you hear the term “introvert,” you might imagine someone who’s quiet and insular, who likes to spend most of their time alone, avoiding social situations. But being an introvert isn’t really anything to do with how much you like spending time with other people. In fact, introverts can have some of the deepest and
In 1951, a 14-year-old Australian boy named James Harrison awoke from a major chest operation. Doctors had removed one of his lungs in a procedure that had taken several hours — and would keep him hospitalized for three months. But Harrison was alive, thanks in large part to a vast quantity of transfused blood
If you managed to time travel back to Ice-Age Europe, you might be forgiven for thinking you had instead crash landed in some desolate part of the African savannah. But the chilly temperatures and the presence of six-ton shaggy beasts with extremely long tusks would confirm you really were in the Pleistocene epoch, otherwise known
The late physicist Stephen Hawking made a huge contribution to cosmology during his lifetime, but he didn’t quite manage to resolve all the mysteries of the universe. Now one of the last papers he ever worked on has been published – and it introduces some new ideas about the size and shape of the cosmos.
There’s no easy way to rate dog intelligence. It can be focused on more than one thing. As canine psychologist Stanley Coren wrote back in the ’90s, there’s adaptive intelligence (i.e., figuring stuff out), working intelligence (i.e. following orders), and instinctive intelligence (i.e. innate talent) – not to mention spatial intelligence, kinesthetic intelligence, interpersonal intelligence,
Nature can be by turns both awe-inspiring and terrifying, and we’re going to place this somewhere in the middle of the two. A monster wave reaching a height of 23.8 metres (78.1 feet) just set a new height record for the southern hemisphere. The huge wave was recorded by a buoy in the Southern
Astronomers have discovered a record-breaking star system. It’s called IGR J17062-6143, and it’s a very compact binary, where one of the stars is a rapidly spinning, superdense neutron star called an X-ray pulsar. The two stars take just 38 minutes to orbit each other. That’s the fastest orbital period of any X-ray pulsar binary
We get it. Sometimes animal names just happen. When it’s late Friday afternoon and you’re the last zoologist at the office, that screaming, hairy armadillo you spotted this morning is now a screaming hairy armadillo. Press send, clock off for the week. Zoology doesn’t need to be so average, though. Especially if a number
Google wants you to stop using the term FOMO. Instead of complaining about your fear of missing out, the search engine giant would like you to celebrate – “JOMO,” the joy of missing out. And it hopes a bunch of new features geared at preventing you from feeling addicted to your devices will help.
Juno has been sending home some incredible postcards of Jupiter, with one slightly frustrating caveat: because of the data transfer limitations, they are, by necessity, still pictures. Now an amateur scientist has used those photographs to extrapolate an animation of Jupiter’s clouds, and the results are just jaw-dropping. Gerald Eichstädt is a member of the Planetary
Everybody needs to get some fresh air every once in a while. Even, uh, robots. Boston Dynamics just uploaded a video of its upright, bipedal robot called Atlas going for a jog. No tethers, no awkward stiffness, just a robot, a green field, and plenty of fresh air. No stress holding it down, Atlas
America’s love affair with the imperial system is a bit of a mess. The soda is in litres, the milk is in gallons, and just one highway in Arizona uses exclusively metres and kilometres. But how did it get this way? Well, a new video, by YouTube channel Half as Interesting, explains the complicated
An underground test of what was claimed by North Korea to be a hydrogen bomb shook the surrounding landscape so violently, it changed the shape of an entire mountain. Radar analysis of the area has revealed changes in the landscape caused by the blast, and they tell an alarming story. The test was conducted
The ongoing surge in volcanic activity on Hawaii’s Big Island soon could cause a massive explosion from a volcano’s summit, scientists and Hawaii officials warned Wednesday. Kilauea, the longest-erupting volcano on the planet, has displaced some 1,700 people and destroyed 36 structures since a shifting flow of underground magma last week burst through the surface
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