In the Solar System, there are over 6,300 known comets. There are millions of asteroids. And of all those objects, only ‘Oumuamua – a red, cigar-shaped asteroid – is known to have come from elsewhere. Until now. A new discovery, revealed just last week, has astronomers excited. A comet named C/2019 Q4 (Borisov), discovered on
According to new research, the dead may not always rest in peace… quite literally. For more than a year after death, corpses move around “significantly”, and this finding could be important for forensic investigations. Researchers at an Australia-based decomposition research facility – colloquially known as a “body farm”, a term some scientists find disrespectful –
Reader question: I heard that carbon dioxide makes up 0.04 percent of the world’s atmosphere. Not 0.4 percent or 4 percent, but 0.04 percent! How can it be so important in global warming if it’s such a small percentage? I am often asked how carbon dioxide can have an important effect on global climate when its
In late July 1997, William Earl Moldt left a nightclub and was never seen again. Until last month, that is. After 22 years on missing persons lists, his last resting place was finally spotted – from space. By random chance, somebody noticed the vehicle Moldt was driving the night he disappeared – a white 1994
The science of climate change is more than 150 years old and it is probably the most tested area of modern science. However the energy industry, political lobbyists and others have spent the last 30 years sowing doubt about the science where none really exists. The latest estimate is that the world’s five largest publicly-owned
On August 30, amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov spotted a comet of extrasolar origin passing through our Solar System. This is the second time in as many years that an interstellar object has been observed (the last being ‘Oumuamua 2.0 in 2017). Thanks to the Gemini Observatory, we now have pictures of this comet, making it
The supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, is usually relatively quiet. It’s not an active nucleus, spewing light and heat into the space around it; most of the time, the black hole’s activity is low key, with minimal fluctuations in its brightness. Most of the time. Recently, astronomers caught
You might think you already know black – even super-black Vantablack, previously the blackest material known to science – but researchers just came up with a material that takes black to a new level of blackness. The new, as-yet-unnamed ultra-black material is made from vertically aligned carbon nanotubes (CNTs), microscopic carbon strings that are a
Astronomers have found a supermassive black hole (SMBH) with an unusually regular feeding schedule. The behemoth is an active galactic nucleus (AGN) at the heart of the Seyfert 2 galaxy GSN 069. The AGN is about 250 million light years from Earth, and contains about 400,000 times the mass of the Sun. The team of
Komodo dragons – the biggest, fiercest, most impressive lizards on our planet – just got that much more amazing. A new discovery shows that under their scaly skin, these animals are completely covered in mail-like armour built out of tiny bones, from nose to tail-tip. Why would something as formidable as a Komodo dragon (Varanus
SpaceX just posted dramatic footage of its commercial space taxi Crew Dragon undergoing rigorous tests of its emergency abort system. The idea is that if something goes wrong with the rocket carrying the Crew Dragon to orbit, the module can engage its own thrusters to quickly escape the danger – and then coast down safely
Last week, behavioural scientist Magnus Söderlund posed a controversial question at a seminar in Sweden: Can you imagine eating human flesh? As global temperatures continue to rise, Söderlund said in a talk at the Gastro Summit in Stockholm, the consequences for agriculture could cause food to become more scarce, which might force humans to consider
A new discovery relating to a rogue star may have just given astronomers a clue towards one of the weirdest mysteries associated with black holes: Where are the middle-sized ones? We know that stellar-mass black holes exist at up to 100 times the mass of the Sun, and supermassive black holes exist that are over 100,000
Hubble has captured a new image of Saturn that makes you wonder if it’s even real. The image is so crisp it makes it look like Saturn is just floating in space. Which it is. This image of the ringed-planet was captured when Saturn was at its closest to Earth, some 1.36 billion km away
Advances in astronomical observation over the past century have allowed scientists to construct a remarkably successful model of how the cosmos works. It makes sense – the better we can measure something, the more we learn. But when it comes to the question of how fast our Universe is expanding, some new cosmological measurements are
Neuroscientists think they have found a key area in our brains that helps us assess and respond to what we find beautiful, also known as aesthetic appeal. And that appeal could be more linked to our sense of self than you might expect. When something pleases us visually – whether it’s a fine piece of
It all started earlier this month. Veterinarians in Oslo, Norway were reportedly flummoxed by a rising number of sick dogs being brought to their practices. The pets appeared to be suffering from some sort of mysterious bowel disease, with similar signs of vomiting and bloody diarrhoea. What had started in the capital city soon spread
Prepare yourself for a shock of the record-breaking variety – scientists have identified two new electric eel species, and one of them can put out a zap that’s stronger than any other animal we know about. The supercharged species is Electrophorus voltai, and it can discharge 860 V of electricity in a single shock, some
When you strike a bell with a hammer, it rings for some time after, as the vibrating metal continues to resonate. And, as it turns out, when you strike a black hole with another black hole, something similar occurs – only instead of sound waves, the newly formed black hole sends gravitational waves rippling out
Two years ago, one freezing December night on a California rooftop, a tiny light shone weakly with a little help from the freezing night air. It wasn’t a very bright glow. But it was enough to demonstrate the possibility of generating renewable power after the Sun goes down. Working with Stanford University engineers Wei Li and
More than 40,000 years ago, the landscape of southwestern Australia was replete with giant kangaroos. One of these extinct kangaroos, known as a short-faced kangaroo, boasted a single-toed clawed foot (modern-day roos have three toes), weighed more than 260 pounds (118 kilograms), and munched on plants. According to a new study published in the journal
A fifty-year-old hypothesis predicting the existence of bodies dubbed Generic Objects of Dark Energy (GEODEs) is getting a second look in light of a proposed correction to assumptions we use to model the way our Universe expands. If this new version of a classic cosmological model is correct, some black holes could hide cores of pure
The region at the centre of our galaxy is still full of mysteries, but astronomers have just found a clue to its past: Huge, radio-emitting bubbles, extending 700 light-years either side of the galactic plane. They could be, the researchers believe, the result of a huge eruption from our galaxy’s supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*.
On March 11, 2011, Japan was struck by the most powerful earthquake in the nation’s history – a magnitude 9 temblor that triggered a tsunami with waves up to 133 feet (40 meters) high. The disaster set off three nuclear meltdowns and three hydrogen explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Eight years later,
Astronomers may have spotted the second object ever to visit our Solar System from another star system. The object may even fly near Mars later this year, though it’s still far away. The scientists’ hunch is strong but not yet certain: Right now, the chances are much higher that the object, known as comet “C/2019
It’s not as if the world needed another symbol for the climate crisis, but now Sweden has one all to itself. After years of rising temperatures and back-to-back summer heatwaves, the southern peak of Kebnekaise, Sweden’s former tallest mountain, has melted into subservience. For decades, the glacier atop this iconic summit has been in retreat, and
In the story of our species, Africa is known as the cradle of humanity. Somewhere on this vast continent, hundreds of thousands of years ago, a group of early humans is thought to have diverged from the others, ultimately spreading across Africa and the rest of the world. These were the first ancestors of modern
A Tokyo-based cashier allegedly stole credit card information from 1,300 customers. According to police, he used only his brain to take the information. Yusuke Taniguchi, 34, was arrested Thursday when police said they discovered he used the stolen information to purchase bags worth an estimated US$2,600 in March, according to CNN. The police intercepted that
In the atmosphere of an exoplanet just 111 light-years away, astronomers have just made a highly exciting discovery: they’ve detected water. As much as 50 percent of the atmosphere of K2-18b could be water vapour. But unlike other giant exoplanets on which atmospheric water has been detected, K2-18b is a super-Earth. It could be rocky,
During the age of the dinosaurs, the skies of North America were home to some of the largest flying animals the world has ever seen. New research now suggests there were at least two types of giant winged reptile living on the continent at the same time. Re-analysing a jumble of pterosaur fossils found in Alberta,
All the comets in our Solar System may share the same origin story – and it could help explain how life on Earth came to exist. A team of American and European scientists found that 14 different comets originated at the same time and place: a protoplanetary disk orbiting near our newly-formed Sun, according to
Almost a third of American adults don’t have the math skills necessary to make effective decisions about their health and finances. These 73 million people can count, sort and do simple arithmetic. But they likely cannot select the health plan with the lowest cost based on annual premiums and deductibles, or figure out that they
The number of fires this year in the Amazon is the highest since 2010, reaching more than 90,000 active fires. Farmers and ranchers routinely use fires to clear the forest. But this year’s number reflects a worrisome uptick in the rate of deforestation, which had started to drop around 2005 before rebounding earlier this decade.
Sixty-six million years ago, Earth had a very bad day indeed. A giant asteroid up to 81 kilometres (50 miles) across smashed into the coast of what is now Mexico near Chicxulub – an event thought to have triggered a wave of extinction that killed 75 percent of all life on Earth. Now, thanks to
A menacing heatwave is brewing in the Pacific Ocean, and it’s got scientists worrying about the return of ‘the Blob’. Roughly five years ago, a huge patch of unusually warm ocean water appeared off the coast of North America, stretching from Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula all the way up to Alaska. It was nicknamed the
Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, might have a more violent past than astronomers realised. A new study suggests that the liquid methane lakes that dot Titan’s surface may have formed when pockets of warming nitrogen exploded below the moon’s surface. This idea would solve a mystery that emerged when NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn – which
New research on one of the most fascinating Dead Sea Scrolls suggests there’s something highly unusual about where and how it was made. Estimated to be close to 2,000 years old, the remarkably well-preserved Dead Sea Scrolls contain ancient texts of great historical importance. Since the initial discovery in 1947 by Bedouin shepherds, scholars have
Remember the spectacle of that gigantic telescope unveiled in a mountain-ringed valley in China just a few years ago? Well, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) has now picked up a mysterious space signal known as a fast radio burst. Fast radio bursts or FRBs are brief but powerful pulses of energy from distant
Earth’s magnetic poles drift over time. This is something that every airplane pilot or navigator knows. They have to account for it when they plan their flights. They drift so much, in fact, that the magnetic poles are in different locations than the geographic poles, or the axis of Earth’s rotation. Today, Earth’s magnetic north
Mathematicians have finally figured out the three cubed numbers that add up to 42. This has settled a problem that has been pondered for 65 years: namely, can each of the natural numbers below 100 be expressed as the sum of three cubes? The problem, set in 1954, is exactly what it sounds like: x3+y3+z3=k.
Nature. Some see it as beautiful and some as red “in tooth and claw“. Of course nature is dynamic, it changes between both the beautiful and the dangerous as in Blake’s famous words: Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? With the
The Milky Way could be teeming with interstellar alien civilizations, according to a new study. We just don’t know about it because they haven’t paid us a visit in 10 million years. The study, published last month in The Astronomical Journal, posits that intelligent extraterrestrial life could be taking its time to explore the galaxy,
When the Boknis Eck Observatory – an environmental monitoring station on the floor of the Baltic Sea off the coast of Germany – stopped sending data on 21 August, scientists thought there was a problem with the data transmission. But when they sent divers down to check, the whole 740-kilogram (1,630-pound) car-sized kit and kaboodle
ScienceAlert editor’s update 08/09/2019: ISRO has reportedly found the location of the Vikram lander, after losing contact with it on its descent to the lunar surface on Saturday. They’re yet to determine what condition the lander is in. In an exclusive interview, ISRO Chairman K. Sivan told India Today TV that the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter
In 2015, a psychologist in Italy figured out how to induce a drug-free altered state of consciousness by asking 20 volunteers to sit and stare into each other’s eyes for 10 minutes straight. Not only did the deceptively simple task bring on strange ‘out of body’ experiences for the volunteers, it also caused them to
For the first time, researchers have been able to highlight specific gene regions that appear to have some influence over left-handedness – and they’ve also found links to differences in brain structure in those who have these genetic variations, too. It’s already been established that whether we’re right- or left-handed depends to some extent –
Mars is well-known for being a dry and arid place, where dusty red sand dunes are prevalent and water exists almost entirely in the form of ice and permafrost. An upside to this, however, is the fact that these conditions are the reason why Mars’ many surface features are so well preserved. And as missions
Protons probably aren’t quite as big as we’d once imagined, according to the results of a sensitive physics experiment that took eight years to complete. Scientists now say our earlier measurements of proton size were off by as much as 5 percent – which might not seem like such a huge correction, but to physicists
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