Rhinos, tigers, pangolins – we’re used to hearing about the mammals that are snatched from the wild so that their body parts can be sold. But did you know that you can buy and sell 36 percent of all known reptile species over the internet? That’s more than one in three species, including the endangered
If you could zoom out and look at the Solar System from a distance, you’d see that the illustrations have at least one thing right: the planets are, more or less, aligned on a flat plane, circling the Sun’s equator. This is called the ecliptic, and it’s thought to be a remnant of how the
Decades of teasing apart Neanderthal DNA has produced an archive of ancient genes that spell out a history of love affairs between estranged branches of humanity’s family tree. Until now, the story has been rather lopsided. For whatever reason, the most well preserved material has come from female remains, leaving an entire male genetic history
On Monday night, NASA flight controllers woke the three men living on the International Space Station. A small air leak seemed to have grown quickly, and ground control wanted to find it fast. NASA and Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, had already narrowed down the likely location of the leak to several modules on the station’s Russian side.
Rampant air pollution in northern Siberia is blocking sunlight and slowing the growth of boreal forests, new research suggests The largest study of tree rings in Norilsk, Russia’s most polluted city and the northernmost city in the world, has found air pollution from local mines and smelters are at least partly to blame for a
Global warming is making the oceans more stable, increasing surface temperatures and reducing the carbon they can absorb, according to research published Monday by climate scientists who warned that the findings have “profound and troubling” implications. Man-made climate change has increased surface temperatures across the planet, leading to atmospheric instability and amplifying extreme weather events,
It’s a question that’s surprisingly hard to answer: why are most of us right-handed, some of us left-handed, and even fewer ambidextrous? Can we point to our genes, or is it an environmental phenomenon? A new genome-wide association study of over 1.7 million people can’t give us all the answers, but it is bringing us
The stuff that makes up our Universe is tricky to measure, to put it mildly. We know that most of the Universe’s matter-energy density consists of dark energy, the mysterious unknown force that’s driving the Universe’s expansion. And we know that the rest is matter, both normal and dark. Accurately figuring out the proportions of
Here’s something we don’t see very often: an Earth-grazing meteoroid. On September 22, 2020, a small space rock skipped through Earth’s atmosphere and bounced back into space. The meteoroid was spotted by a camera from the Global Meteor Network, seen in the skies above Northern Germany and the Netherlands. It came in as low as 91
Tens of thousands of people were forced to flee their homes in California’s Napa and Sonoma valleys on Monday as wildfires fanned by fierce winds ripped through the world-famous wine region. Under an opaque orange sky and a sweltering heatwave, vineyards were consumed and buildings devastated by the blaze that spread at a “dangerous rate”
An abnormally bad season of weather may have had a significant impact on the death toll from both World War I and the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, according to new research, with many more lives being lost due to torrential rain and plummeting temperatures. Through a detailed analysis of an ice core extracted from the
The surface of Mars is renowned for its aridity. The entire planet is a dusty, barren desert – a wasteland of rock and, in some regions, ice; but of liquid water, not a confirmed drop has been found. But in 2018, scientists unveiled a bombshell discovery – they’d found evidence of a colossal underground reservoir
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, toilet paper was nearly as hard to come by as personal protective equipment. Though toilet paper has existed in the Western world since at least the 16th century CE and in China since the second century BCE, billions of people don’t use toilet paper even today. In earlier
Tarantulas don’t just come in brown and black. These large, hairy spiders can also display wonderful hues of blue, green, purple, and red. Yet tarantulas are most active at twilight, meaning they’re ‘crepuscular’ animals – where vibrant colours are significantly harder to see (at least for us). Until now, researchers didn’t know if they could even see
New research into the minds of crows has revealed a jaw-dropping finding: the canny corvids aren’t just clever – they also possess a form of consciousness, able to be consciously aware of the world around them in the present. In other words, they have subjective experiences. This is called primary, or sensory, consciousness, and it
Eat or be eaten: It’s an edict of Mother Nature that connects every corner of the biosphere in a sprawling web of producers, consumers, detritivores, and scavengers. Every corner but one, it seems. Just what the hell dines on viruses? Scientists may have just discovered the answer. Given the fact that the viral biomass dusting
Billions of years ago, long before oxygen was readily available, the notorious poison arsenic could have been the compound that breathed new life into our planet. In Chile’s Atacama Desert, in a place called Laguna La Brava, scientists have been studying a purple ribbon of photosynthetic microbes living in a hypersaline lake that’s permanently free
For mouthless, lungless bacteria, breathing is a bit more complicated than it is for humans. We inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide; Geobacter - a ubiquitous, groundwater-dwelling genus of bacteria – swallow up organic waste and ‘exhale’ electrons, generating a tiny electric current in the process. Those waste electrons always need somewhere to go (usually into
No one has yet managed to travel through time – at least to our knowledge – but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists. As movies such as The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future and many others show, moving around in time creates a
As the US prepares to return humans to the Moon this decade, one of the biggest dangers future astronauts will face is space radiation that can cause lasting health effects, from cataracts to cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. Though the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s proved it was safe for people to spend a
Wildfires are burning the West Coast, hurricanes are flooding the Southeast — and some of those storms are rising from the dead. “Zombie storms”, which regain strength after initially petering out, are the newest addition to the year 2020. And these undead weather anomalies are becoming more common thanks to climate change. “Because 2020, we
The discovery of more than a thousand fossilised teeth in a prehistoric river bed is eating away at our current definition of dinosaurs. Today, palaeontologists generally consider this extinct group of reptiles to be solely land-based, but one enormous species simply won’t stay dry. The species, Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, with its giant fin-like tail, has been
Jupiter. Most massive planet in the solar system – twice that of all the other planets combined. This giant world formed from the same cloud of dust and gas that became our Sun and the rest of the planets. But Jupiter was the first-born of our planetary family. As the first planet, Jupiter’s massive gravitational
Huge volcanic eruptions 233 million years ago pumped carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapour into the atmosphere. This series of violent explosions, on what we now know as the west coast of Canada, led to massive global warming. Our new research has revealed that this was a planet-changing mass extinction event that killed off many
In the cold, dense medium of a helium-3 superfluid, scientists recently made an unexpected discovery. A foreign object travelling through the medium could exceed a critical speed limit without breaking the fragile superfluid itself. As this contradicts our understanding of superfluidity, it presented quite a puzzle – but now, by recreating and studying the phenomenon,
The International Space Station has been leaking for more than a year. While the station is perpetually losing some air, officials first noticed an increase in that airflow last September. At the time the leak wasn’t major, but this summer they saw an uptick in that already higher-than-usual rate. So in late August, the three
Last year, for the first time, the world gazed in collective wonder at an actual direct image of a black hole’s shadow. Now, looking back at earlier, more rudimentary images, scientists have found evidence that the ring around M87* has a wobble that makes it look as though it’s glittering. Last year’s history-making image was
It was very common for ancient Egyptians to be buried with mummified birds as offerings to the gods, including Horus, Ra or Thoth. In fact, the number of sacrificial birds of prey and ibis buried with Egyptian mummies is thought to reach into the millions. But up until now it hasn’t been clear whether the
California Governor Gavin Newsom on Wednesday ordered all passenger vehicles sold in the state to be zero-emission by 2035 to fight climate change and smog-fouled air. The transportation sector causes more than half of California’s carbon pollution, and parts of the state are vexed by some of the most toxic air in the country, according
As the streets of San Francisco emptied out in the first months of the pandemic, the city’s male birds began singing more softly and improving their vocal range, making them “sexier” to females, according to a new study published Thursday. The paper adds to a growing body of research describing how animals – from whales
It’s hard to fathom that carnivorous plants exist. When Charles Darwin first described how a Venus flytrap worked, calling it “one of the most wonderful [plants] in the world”, some people simply didn’t believe him. Today, just as we’ve come to appreciate the gruesome nature of these remarkable predators – which can capture and eat flies, rats,
In 2013, a suffocatingly hot blob of water brewed in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of North America. It then decimated marine life. Thousands of seabirds washed up dead on shores, along with starving baby sea lions. Salmon, krill, and other marine animals vanished as the warmth fuelled a massive toxic algal bloom that
Raising Earth’s average surface temperature another degree Celsius will lock in 2.5 metres of sea level rise from Antarctica alone and an extra three degrees see the frozen continent lift oceans 6.5 metres, scientists warned Wednesday. These devastating increases in the global waterline – enough to cripple coastal cities from Mumbai to Miami and displace
The history of today’s stainless steel industry can be traced back to the early 19th century, when scientists noticed iron-chromium alloys resisted corrosion by certain acids. New research, however, suggests a similar alloy was being developed much, much earlier than this – even as far back as a thousand years ago. Archaeologists have found what they think
Earth’s lost eighth continent, Zealandia, sank into the sea between 50 and 35 million years ago. Today, we know the tiny fraction of it that remains above the waves as New Zealand. But before most of Zealandia disappeared – about 60 million years ago – ancient penguins walked upon the 2-million-square-mile continent (5.18 million square kilometres).
It was 1952, and Alan Turing was about to reshape humanity’s understanding of biology. In a landmark paper, the English mathematician introduced what became known as the Turing pattern – the notion that the dynamics of certain uniform systems could give rise to stable patterns when disturbed. Such ‘order from disturbance’ has become the theoretical
An asteroid will get awfully close to Earth this Thursday (September 24), when it whizzes by our planet closer than the Moon orbits. The asteroid – known as 2020 SW – isn’t expected to collide with Earth, according to the Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. But it will get close, passing
A new exoplanet discovery is the first of its kind, sitting in a strange ‘gap’ of exoplanets insanely close to their host stars. The planet is a Neptune-sized body that whips around its star once every 19 hours. Never before has a Neptune-sized exoplanet been found with an orbital period of less than a day.
Scientists have long theorised that there are other types of superconductor out there waiting to be discovered, and it turns out they were right: new research has identified a g-wave superconductor for the first time, a major development in this area of physics. Superconductors are materials that offer no electrical resistance, so electricity can pass
NASA has released its first full plan for its Artemis missions, which aim to put the first woman on the moon and the first man since 1972. The plan calls for a lunar landing in 2024, but before that, NASA intends to launch two other missions to the moon to test its new Orion spacecraft. “Our plan to
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station were carrying out an “avoidance maneuver” on Tuesday to ensure the ISS would not be hit by a piece of debris, the US space agency NASA announced. The debris should pass within “several kilometers” (miles) of the station, but out of an abundance of caution, the ISS’s trajectory was
Innovative ways to live more sustainably are urgently required – including in how we ship items across the planet. Right now, 90 percent of the world’s merchandise is transported by shipping, and although that can be better for the environment than air freight according to certain measures, cargo ships are still powered by fossil fuels,
Every exoplanet is special in its own way, but a newly discovered exoplanet 186 light-years away is an especially delicious treat. It’s a smallish world around the same size as Earth, whipping around its star on an orbit that takes just 3.14 days. That’s extremely close to the mathematical constant π (Pi), the number that
US government scientists reported Monday that the Arctic Ocean’s floating ice cover has shrivelled to its second lowest extent since satellite records began in 1979. Until this month, only once in the last 42 years has Earth’s frozen skull cap covered less than 4 million square kilometres (1.5 million square miles). The trend line is
Hundreds of elephants that died mysteriously in Botswana’s famed Okavango Delta succumbed to cyanobacteria poisoning, the wildlife department revealed on Monday. The landlocked southern African country boasts the world’s largest elephant population, estimated at around 130,000. More than 300 of the pachyderms have mysteriously died since March, with their intact tusks ruling out the hypothesis
We all know and love our Moon. It’s been Earth’s constant companion for billions of years, a mainstay of the skies. But it’s not our only companion. Every now and again, a smaller object gets temporarily captured in our planet’s orbit, hanging around for a short period of time – a few months or years –
Water is a very strange thing. In our everyday experience, when liquid water drops below 0 °C (32 °F or 273.15 Kelvin), it freezes into a solid form, becoming ice. But ice, it turns out, is rather weird too. Most of the time, ice seems to be the same frozen solid, no matter where you
Funnel webs are considered one of Australia’s most fearsome spiders, but their ability to kill humans is by accident rather than design, our new research shows. In findings published today, we reveal how the highly toxic and quick-acting venom of male funnel-web spiders is likely to have developed as a defence against predators. When male
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