Polarons are important nanoscale phenomena: a transient configuration between electrons and atoms (known as quasiparticles) that exist for only trillionths of a second. These configurations have unique characteristics that can help us understand some of the mysterious behaviours of the materials they form within – and scientists have just observed them for the first time. Polarons
It’s no accident that cats are adorable: We’ve selectively bred them across generations for maximum cuteness. But that breeding has a downside: It’s left some of our feline friends with permanent frowny faces that cannot show emotions. In particular, new research published in December in the journal Frontiers of Veterinary Science suggests that selective breeding for the “brachycephalic,” or
Scientists have identified the traits that may make a person more likely to claim they hear the voices of the dead. According to new research, a predisposition to high levels of absorption in tasks, unusual auditory experiences in childhood, and a high susceptibility to auditory hallucinations all occur more strongly in self-described clairaudient mediums than
Evidence of a long-sought hypothetical particle could have been hiding in plain (X-ray) sight all this time. The X-ray emission coming off a collection of neutron stars known as the Magnificent Seven is so excessive that it could be coming from axions, a long-predicted kind of particle, forged in the dense cores of these dead
Even though we know the deep sea is weird, ‘carnivorous sea sponges’ still sound like something from a sci-fi movie. And yet, researchers just announced the discovery of three new such species off the coast of Australia. Go a few hundred metres deep into the ocean, and it starts to look like you’re in a whole new
NASA announced Thursday that 2020 was likely the planet’s hottest year on record, edging out 2016 by one-tenth of a degree Celsius. The temperatures were close enough to fall within the scientists’ margin of error, so they considered it “a statistical tie.” Average global temperatures in 2020 were 1.84 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) warmer
NASA’s mega-sized moon rocket encountered an engine issue during a critical test on Saturday, and the error could further delay the agency’s effort to send astronauts back to the moon. The rocket, called Space Launch System (SLS), is designed to eventually stand 365 feet (111 meters) and ferry astronauts to the moon sometime in the mid-
Red dwarf stars are the most common kind of star in our neighbourhood, and probably in the Milky Way. Because of that, many of the Earth-like and potentially life-supporting exoplanets we’ve detected are in orbit around red dwarfs. The problem is that red dwarfs can exhibit intense flaring behaviour, much more energetic than our relatively
The end of the last ice age, around 12,000 years ago, was characterised by a final cold phase called the Younger Dryas. Scandinavia was still mostly covered in ice, and across Europe the mountains had many more, and larger, glaciers than today. There was a substantial icefield in the west of Scotland and glaciers could
Most people associate the word “coral” with sunshine, blue skies and Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. In fact, more than half of the 5,100 species on the planet exist as “cold-water corals” in deep and dark parts of the world’s oceans. Unlike most other animals, corals are immobile and so rely heavily on currents to transport
SpaceX is preparing to rocket the latest prototype of its Starship spaceship thousands of feet into the air, then land it gently back on the ground. If the company can pull off this tricky manoeuvre – cutting the rocket’s engines back on as it plummets toward Earth, just in time to turn it upright, slow
For most people, the word “vampire” brings to mind Dracula or perhaps slayers such as Blade or Buffy; or maybe even the vampire bats of South America. Few will think of a small and rather lovely bird – the finch. But there are indeed “vampire finches” that feast on the blood of much larger birds,
Say a red gummy bear has a baby with a yellow gummy bear – what percentage of red and yellow do the parents give to their children? Well, assuming gummy bear genetics works the same way we do, they’ll have one set of chromosomes from their mum and one from their dad – so 50
A lonely rhinoceros at a Bangladesh zoo is looking for new love after losing her partner seven years ago, but pandemic travel restrictions are hampering her keeper’s attempts to play matchmaker. Kanchi, a star attraction at the Bangladesh National Zoo, is at her most fertile age. But since the death of her male partner in
Apocalypse or revolution? Depending on the study making headlines, insect numbers around the world are either in dramatic freefall or simply an alarming state of flux, with some species even benefiting from changes in climate. While researchers debate the details, most are in agreement that our existing lifestyle is fundamentally linked with insect numbers, and
Underwater seagrass in coastal areas appear to trap bits of plastic in natural bundles of fibre known as ‘Neptune balls’, researchers said Thursday. With no help from humans, the swaying plants – anchored to shallow seabeds – may collect nearly 900 million plastic items in the Mediterranean alone every year, they reported in the journal
Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity profoundly changed our thinking about fundamental concepts in physics, such as space and time. But it also left us with some deep mysteries. One was black holes, which were only unequivocally detected over the past few years. Another was “wormholes” – bridges connecting different points in spacetime, in theory
A desert gecko from Namibia has brilliant glow-in-the-dark markings that shine neon green by the light of the moon. The mechanism that produces its glow has never been seen before in land animals with backbones. Web-footed geckos (Pachydactylus rangei) have translucent skin with large, yellowish markings: stripes on their sides and rings surrounding their eyes. But those
Electric eels appear to not be the loners we thought they were. In a small lake deep in the Amazon River basin in Brazil, scientists have for the first time recorded the fish not just living together, but actively working together to forage, and to bring down their prey. There’s even evidence that the strategy
We know that all the excess CO2 we’re pumping into the air – alongside a host of other damaging effects – is driving up the acidity of the oceans as it sinks and dissolves into the water, but it seems as though the hardy octopus can find ways to adapt to its rapidly changing environment.
Physicists have observed a new state of matter at work inside an elusive thread of quantum gas. The gossamer-thin strings of gas capable of binding giants sound like items worthy of a quest in Grimms’ fairy tales. But versions of these materials are theoretically possible in physics – unfortunately though, in practice they inevitably collapse
To us humans, a single Sun feels completely normal, but our Solar System is actually a weird outlier. Most stars in the Milky Way galaxy have at least one companion star. Now, in a system 1,800 light-years away, astronomers have finally confirmed a gas giant planet orbiting a star in a triple star system. This
Forests and other land ecosystems today absorb 30 percent of humanity’s CO2 pollution, but rapid global warming could transform these natural ‘sinks’ into carbon ‘sources’ within a few decades, opening another daunting front in the fight against climate change, alarmed researchers have said. Climate skeptics often describe CO2 as “plant food”, suggesting that increased greenhouse
For decades, scientists have wrestled with a complex mystery of physics: Could the immense amounts of energy theoretically produced by rotating black holes ever be tapped by human hands? If future societies were somehow able to pull off this magnificent feat, the power supply of far-off galactic civilisations would seemingly be assured – and now
It’s always a sad day when a mission comes to an end. And it’s even sadder when the mission never really got going in the first place. That’s where we’re at with NASA’s InSight lander. The entire mission isn’t over, but the so-called Mole, the instrument designed and built by Germany’s DLR, has been pronounced dead. The
Curiosity affects everything from our relationships to our education, but it’s not easy to pin down and put under a microscope to study. With the help of Wikipedia though, researchers have now done just, exploring two main types of curiosity. Using Wikipedia browsing as an activity to observe, and a maths technique called graph theory
It turns out that planets can live a very long time indeed. Around one of the galaxy’s oldest stars, an orange dwarf named TOI-561 just 280 light-years away, astronomers have found three orbiting exoplanets – one of which is a rocky world 1.5 times the size of Earth, whipping around the star on a breakneck
The emergency is not invisible. But that doesn’t mean we can see it. After decades of inaction and ineffective action on biodiversity decline, climate change, and pollution, civilisation stands on the precipice of a “ghastly future” it has gravely underestimated, an international team of scientific experts warns in an unnerving new study published this week.
SpaceX is on course to rocket tens of thousands of satellites into Earth’s orbit, part of Elon Musk‘s plan to blanket the planet in high-speed internet. For the first time, data shows that the company may be able to accomplish this feat without marring everyone’s view of the night sky. When the first bright trails
The idea of artificial intelligence overthrowing humankind has been talked about for many decades, and scientists have just delivered their verdict on whether we’d be able to control a high-level computer super-intelligence. The answer? Almost definitely not. The catch is that controlling a super-intelligence far beyond human comprehension would require a simulation of that super-intelligence
The oldest-known animal drawing in the world is a 45,500-year-old depiction of a hairy, warty pig on a cave wall in Indonesia, a new study finds. The mulberry colored painting, drawn with the red mineral ochre, shows the profile of what is likely a Sulawesi warty pig (Sus celebensis), a wild stubby-legged beast with facial warts that can
The ancient, extinct dire wolf may have been among the lonest of the wolves – so genetically distinct from its closest wolf relative that it could no longer interbreed, forcing it into an evolutionary dead end when it died out 13,000 years ago. That’s the finding based on a new study, the in-depth analysis of
They say the truth is out there, but nobody ever said it would be easy to find. Now, after a search lasting decades, a giant trove of long-classified records held by the CIA in relation to reported UFO activity has finally come to light. This huge public release of what the CIA claims is its
Roughly every 114 days, almost like clockwork, a galaxy 570 million light-years away lights up like a firework. Since at least 2014, our observatories have recorded this strange behaviour; now, astronomers have put the pieces together to figure out why. In the centre of the spiral galaxy, named ESO 253-G003, a supermassive black hole is
Every eight years during fall, a plague of millipedes swarm train lines in mountainous Japan, earning them the nickname ‘train millipedes’. Working together, these small beasties (around 3 cm or 1.18 inches long) – which play a large role cycling nitrogen in Japan’s larch forests – have forced trains to come to a skidding halt.
We are, by now, pretty familiar with the concept of the Goldilocks zone. Also known as the habitable zone, it’s the distance from a star at which liquid water can be present on the surface on a planet – not so hot as to be vaporised, nor so cold as to be frozen. These conditions
Metals and insulators are the yin and yang of physics, their respective material properties strictly dictated by their electrons’ mobility – metals should conduct electrons freely, while insulators keep them in place. So when physicists from Princeton University in the US found a quantum quirk of metals bouncing around inside an insulating compound, they were
At least two gorillas at California’s San Diego Zoo have caught the coronavirus, the first known instance of natural transmission to great apes, officials said Monday. Two primates began coughing last week and have since tested positive for COVID-19, while a third is showing symptoms, Governor Gavin Newsom said. They are thought to have contracted
A galaxy billions of light-years away is the most distant of its kind we’ve found to date, embodying yet another challenge to our models of black hole and galaxy formation, and offering a rare glimpse into the early Universe. It’s named J0313-1806, a quasar over 13 billion light-years from Earth, fully formed with a bafflingly
Microplastics are everywhere. These tiny plastic fragments can be found throughout the oceans, infiltrating the animals within it, the food we eat, and even our children. The proliferation extends from the highest peak in the world to the beginnings of life itself. Even the remoteness of Earth’s polar regions offers no shelter from the storm
Two thin strands wound together in a spiraling helix: This is the iconic shape of a DNA molecule. But sometimes, DNA can form a rare quadruple-helix, and this odd structure may play a role in diseases like cancer. Not much is known about these four-stranded DNA, known as G-quadruplexes — but now, scientists have developed a
It’s not a question you might have thought about, but which came first: sleep or the brain? To put it another way, can organisms without brains go to sleep? Based on a study of primitive, water-dwelling life forms called Hydra vulgaris, scientists might finally have the answer. New research shows how these tiny creatures can
The thylacine has long been considered a truly remarkable species. The extinct Australian beast was a marsupial, but its skull was distinctly canine in appearance, almost identical to the skulls of red foxes and grey wolves. Now, new research has confirmed that this resemblance wasn’t limited to adult thylacines (Thylacinus cynocephalus) – it was present
Scientists have created new kinds of ‘living materials’ by tweaking the base ingredients of kombucha – the popular tea drink fermented with a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (aka SCOBY). This kind of ‘tea fungus’ – sometimes called ‘kombucha mother’ – can do a lot more than just produce sour-tasting beverages, it seems. By
Tithonium Chasma is one big canyon. At a staggering 810 kilometres (503 miles) long, it’s a large part of Valles Marineris – the biggest canyon system we know of in the whole Solar System. This close-up image of the chasma was taken back in 2013 by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on
Scientists have identified an entirely new mode of snake locomotion. The newly documented climbing behaviour is difficult, but allows snakes to impressively shimmy up large, smooth cylinders. Researchers have dubbed it ‘lasso locomotion’, because the snake climbs poles by lassoing its body around the cylindrical structures, gripping them tightly in a looped noose from torso
Based on what we know about gravitational waves, the Universe should be full of them. Every colliding pair of black holes or neutron stars, every core-collapse supernova – even the Big Bang itself – should have sent ripples ringing across spacetime. After all this time, these waves would be weak and hard to find, but
In a first-of-its-kind discovery, scientists have found that a species of non-photosynthetic bacteria are regulated by the same circadian rhythms that hold sway over so many other life-forms. In humans, our circadian rhythms act as a kind of biological clock in our cells, controlling virtually all the processes in our bodies, influencing when we sleep
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