Is there any dinosaur more iconic than Tyrannosaurus Rex? Its mighty jaws and fierce mien ignite the imaginations of four-year-olds everywhere. It’s the dinosaur poster child – yet this fearsome beast’s beginnings were, new evidence suggests, quite humble. How humble? Well, a little smaller than a kangaroo, as we now know from a newly discovered
Sixty-six million years ago, something changed the world catastrophically. Around 75 percent of the world’s plant and animal species died, wiping out the dinosaurs. This marked the end of the Cretaceous period, and started a new dawn on Earth – the Cenozoic, the age of mammals. But we don’t entirely know what caused it. Fossil
Years ago, the small, ratlike rodents could be seen scurrying across the sand and coral rubble on the Australian island of Bramble Cay. Fishermen would sometimes see them while visiting the island, which is dotted with a few grass clumps, shorebirds and nesting sea turtles in the Great Barrier Reef. As mackerel fisherman Egon Stewart
Earth might have a dizzying array of life forms, but our biology ultimately remains a solitary data point – we simply don’t have a reference for life based on DNA different from our own. Now, scientists have taken matters into their hands to push the boundaries on what life could be like. Research funded by
When Charles Darwin famously visited the Galapagos Islands back in 1835, he discovered a volcanic archipelago that was home to 15 different species of giant tortoise. Today, after killing off more than 100,000 of these strange creatures, we are down to about 10 species, many of which are critically endangered. One was missing for over
Damage-resistant genes. Healing powers. Very low risk of cancer. No, scientists aren’t describing Wolverine or Superman – those are the powers of the great white shark. The star of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster, whose scientific name is Carcharodon carcharias, has a reputation as a meat-eating monster of the sea. But in fact, great white sharks may
We humans like to put labels and boundaries on things. For example, the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space is the Kármán line, the point at 100 kilometres (62 miles) altitude where aeronautics end, and astronautics take over. But Earth’s atmosphere is way more complicated than that (there’s even some debate about where the Kármán
Looking at a picture of Wallace’s giant bee, you wouldn’t pick this insect as elusive. Four times as big as a honeybee, and a stark black colour, it looks like the security guard or bouncer of the bee world. But researchers have just released the first photos and video of a live Wallace’s giant bee
We know that many of the traits we see in animals are there because they evolved by somehow being useful to the species. But evolution is messy, and the supposed benefits of weird features aren’t always obvious. Take zebra stripes, for example. The stark black and white garb of the three zebra species roaming Africa
Something about atoms has never added up. Fundamental particles called quarks get kind of sluggish once they’re caught up in crowds of protons and neutrons – and quite frankly, they shouldn’t. For decades, physicists have hunted for clues on the quark’s tendency to slow down in larger atoms, but have come up empty-handed. But now,
Over the past few months, Elon Musk has been revealing new details about SpaceX’s upcoming launch system, called Starship. Musk has said the new launch vehicle, which he and engineers recently redesigned, will eventually replace all the company’s rockets. It will be fully reusable and extremely cheap to launch, the thinking goes – perhaps reducing
After several years of controversy and debate, researchers in Sweden are more convinced than ever that female Viking warriors once existed. Re-examining a contentious discovery from 2017, the researchers have again determined that the ancient Birka skeleton, found in a 10th-century Viking warrior tomb, did, in fact, belong to a biological female. “The buried person has
Imagine a highly sophisticated body armor that is a tough as it is flexible, a shield that consists largely of water, but remains strong enough to prevent mechanical penetration. Now imagine that this armor is not only strong, but also soft and stretchy, so much so that the wearer is able to move their body
A new optical instrument that can detect plant-based organisms from kilometres away due to the unique way living things reflect light could one day help in the search for life beyond this planet, new research suggests. The working prototype device – called the TreePol spectropolarimeter – is the result of years of research by Dutch
Neptune, it seems, has been keeping a few secrets. A teeny tiny moon has been found in orbit around the enigmatic outermost known planet – previously undetected, even though it’s right here in our Solar System. It’s been named Hippocamp, after the half-fish, half-horse of Greek mythology (in keeping with Neptune’s sea theme), and it’s
For those of us outside the conspiracy, the idea that Earth is flat is so ridiculous, the people who believe it are easy to make fun of. But on forum groups, in YouTube comments, and in person at conferences, flat-Earthers are deadly serious. And one of the biggest sources for renewed interest in flat Earth
Almost a century ago, British geologist and archaeologist Herbert Henry Thomas provocatively claimed he knew where Stonehenge’s famous rocks came from. While his findings and methods have since been disputed, it turns out Thomas was almost right – with new results from a painstaking eight-year excavation project finally identifying where the mysterious megaliths originated. A
The Universe just got a little more crowded with the discovery of more than 300,000 potential galaxies in a tiny corner of the northern sky. A release of data gathered by the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) telescope network in Europe has added extraordinary new levels of detail to the map of radio waves across the
You’re not hallucinating: Yes, the Moon looks brighter than normal, and yes, it looks bigger too. But Tuesday evening will bring the real show: what astronomers at NASA call a “perigean” moon, or “supermoon”. The event will coincide with a full moon that’s often referred to as a “snow moon” or “hunger moon”. It’s not
Something inexplicable has been going on at the Grand Canyon museum, and the truth is stranger than fiction. It all started in March of 2018, when the teenage son of a park employee was testing out their Geiger counter in the museum collection room. As the young radiation enthusiast was wandering around the space, they
A group of computer scientists once backed by Elon Musk has caused some alarm by developing an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) they say is too dangerous to release to the public. OpenAI, a research non-profit based in San Francisco, says its “chameleon-like” language prediction system, called GPT–2, will only ever see a limited release in
Humanity has always had an uneasy relationship with wolves. They loom large in our ancient mythologies as fearsome beasts; over the millennia, that fear has led to devastation of wolf populations across Europe, including 19th century Germany. In the 1960s, numbers of wolves (Canis lupus) in Europe hit an all-time low, veering perilously close to
It’s been snowing in Siberia. But instead of waking to a white winter wonderland, residents in Russia’s coal basin are living through a dark, industrial nightmare. Three separate cities within the coal-mining region of Kemerovo in southwest Siberia have been blanketed in a thick, black deluge of toxic snow, polluted by ever-present coal dust that
If you live in the Southern Hemisphere, next time you get the opportunity, go outside and look at the night sky. Most of that celestial plain is covered in a star cluster that’s been torn apart by galactic tidal forces, and is now flowing past us as a giant river of over 4,000 stars. Although
For years, the internet has hemmed and hawed over a mysterious yet universal truth: a grape, sliced nearly in half and placed in the microwave, will suddenly begin to spit plasma. The fiery sight had us mystified for years, garnering millions of views online and a variety of expert opinions, none of which were based
At first glance, the two rows of portraits at the top of this article just look like a bunch of average-looking people. The catch is, none of them exist. All of these faces are fakes, put together by artificial intelligence. To be more precise, these faces are created by a generative adversarial network (GAN) developed
We finally have real evidence about what microdosing psychedelic drugs does to your brain. Long advocated by people who claim that a teensy daily dose of LSD helps them with their high-pressure jobs, microdosing has been shown to reduce depressive symptoms and stress while boosting focus and levels of neuroticism, according to research published in
It was a cold and hazy afternoon when Travis Kauffman set out on a scenic run through the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in northern Colorado. The 31-year-old runner told reporters that he ran up a nature trail earlier this month near Fort Collins and made his way to the top to take in the
The Pinna-Brelstaff illusion is tremendous fun: concentric rings of shapes, with inverse shading. When you move your head closer to or farther from the illusion, the rings appear to rotate, expand, and contract (go ahead, we’ll wait while you try this with the picture above). We know the shading effect plays a role in tricking our brains
Soft, squishy, ancient spiders are hard to investigate – they don’t fossilise as easily as bones or exoskeletons. So you can imagine how excited researchers were to find 10 brand new spider fossils in a relatively unexplored area called the Jinju Formation. The Jinju Formation is a geological area of South Korea from the Mesozoic era,
Thousands of years ago, an ancient hominin strode through a sand dune, leaving footprints behind. Most of these marks were lost to the ravages of the years, but one was preserved as the sand hardened to stone. That print, scientists have now determined, may have been made by a Neanderthal on the island of Gibraltar.
An ambitious new analysis of the world’s forests found that there’s space to plant 1.2 trillion new trees – a number that would absorb more carbon than human emissions. According to the new data, ETH Zurich researcher Thomas Crowther told The Independent, trees are “our most powerful weapon in the fight against climate change.” Crowther
Sirius, a double-star system and the brightest object in the night sky, will briefly blink out of existence for parts of Earth on Monday evening. In an event called an occultation – when one object in space blocks the light of another behind it – a small asteroid known as (4388) Jürgenstock will slip in front of the
There’s been a recent increase globally in outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases. This can be seen in recent measles outbreaks in parts of the world where it was thought to have been eradicated. This has prompted the World Health Organisation to list “vaccine hesitancy” (the reluctance or refusal to vaccinate despite the availability of vaccines) as
SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk, is working diligently on a wildly ambitious project: to permanently settle people on Mars. To help make that vision a reality, Musk’s company is developing a colossal, fully reusable launch system called Starship. Starship is envisioned as a 180-foot-tall spaceship that will ride into orbit atop Super Heavy, a
China’s Academy of Space Technology is working on an orbital power plant that would capture solar energy in space and beam it back to Earth. The plant would be able to harness solar power even when it’s cloudy back on Earth, since its photovoltaic array would be floating high above any terrestrial weather. With plans to
There’s an old saying, “When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on.” In other words, before you give up, take matters into your own hands and try a little harder. As a psychology researcher, I believe this adage applies to relationships, too. Before you let go, look
The Great Barrier Reef just can’t catch a break. Year after year, this global treasure has been battered by cyclones and beaten by bleaching events. Now, with little time to recover, a part of the reef is being kicked while its down. An exceptional year of rainfall in Queensland, Australia has caused a huge flood
Long-duration spaceflight does weird things to the human body, even at the molecular level, but so far there’s no reason to think humans couldn’t survive a two-and-a-half-year round-trip journey to Mars. That was the bottom-line message Friday from a NASA official and two scientists as they revealed more results from the agency’s “Twins Study,” which
For twent million years, the world’s oceans were home to a monstrous shark, named the ‘megalodon’. Then suddenly, without explanation, the 18-metre-long (50 foot) super predator disappeared. It’s a juicy bit of ancient history that has inspired a host of books, documentaries and blockbuster films, some of which like to imagine that this bloody thirsty
Most of us have been caught out by weather forecasts that didn’t quite turn out as predicted, but today’s sophisticated models can make reasonably decent guesses up to 10 days in advance. Now a newly developed computing technique promises to push that limit out even further. If the system fulfils its initial promise, we could
Sleep is pretty great. In humans, evidence suggests it has a whole range of benefits, including this one: it keeps the brain healthy by letting neurons prune unnecessary synaptic connections we make during the day. This process, called synaptic homeostasis, prevents the brain from being overrun by useless memories. It’s possible that it helps to improve
“Nurdles” may sound cute but they pose a huge risk to the marine environment. Also known as “mermaid tears”, these small plastic pellets are a feedstock in the plastic industry. Instead of being converted into household items, many end up in the ocean, collecting toxins on their surfaces and being eaten by marine wildlife. Not
Our Sun can let out some solar flare rip-snorters from time to time, but it’s actually pretty quiet when compared to some other stars out there. Particularly, it seems, turbulent young stars. And astronomers have just caught one belching out a real corker. It’s called JW 566, a young star about 389 parsecs (1,269 light-years)
The British Columbia Coroners Service has asked the public to help identify a foot found in West Vancouver, on the shores of the Salish Sea. It might sound like a gruesome find at first, but it’s actually a surprisingly common occurrence in these parts. Detached human feet in various states of decay have been appearing
Classic sci-fi writer Jules Verne once imagined a whole subterranean landscape deep inside the planet, complete with lost prehistoric species and plant life. The book was aptly titled Journey to the Centre of the Earth. We might not actually find dinosaurs down there, but new research is revealing features in the underworld resembling structures on the
Astronomers have known for some time that the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies will collide on some future date. The best guess for that rendezvous has been about 3.75 billion years from now. But now a new study based on Data Release 2 from the ESA’s Gaia mission is bringing some clarity to this
The seabed is not flat and smooth like the shimmering ocean above it. It’s a jagged, uneven landscape of submerged mountains and valleys, all hidden from sight – but not from science. By analysing the isotopic composition of the rocks that make up these underwater mountains networks – called mid-ocean ridges – scientists can identify
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