Astronomers have mapped about a million previously undiscovered galaxies beyond the Milky Way, in the most detailed survey of the southern sky ever carried out using radio waves. The Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey (or RACS) has placed the CSIRO’s Australian SKA Pathfinder radio telescope (ASKAP) firmly on the international astronomy map. While past surveys have
Month: November 2020
Why and how our dreams are affected by our daily lives has long fascinated scientists, and a new study sheds some light on how the spread of COVID-19 – and the ongoing changes in our habits – is impacting what we dream about. Anger and sadness have become more common in dreams as the pandemic
For the first time, scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have formally identified a new species of undersea creature based solely on high-definition video footage captured at the bottom of the ocean. And what an undersea creature it is. Meet Duobrachium sparksae – a strange, gelatinous species of ctenophore, encountered by the remotely
Like all stars, our Sun is powered by the fusion of hydrogen into heavier elements. Nuclear fusion is not only what makes stars shine, it is also a primary source of the chemical elements that make the world around us. Much of our understanding of stellar fusion comes from theoretical models of atomic nuclei, but
Strangely come, strangely go. Only days after the world first became aware of it, a mysterious metal monolith in the remote desert of Utah’s Red Rock Country has now seemingly vanished from sight. The object made headlines last week, after authorities with the Utah Department of Public Safety (DPS) announced the discovery of the strange,
On the wide open slopes of China’s Hengduan Mountains, there are perks to being a wallflower. After thousands of years of human harvesting, a rare alpine flower – prized in Chinese medicine – is trying its hardest not to stand out. In the alpine meadows where humans pluck the Fritillaria delavayi plant the most, scientists have
We all want our family life to be as happy as possible – and now researchers have identified some of the personal characteristics and skills that are most likely to make for a harmonious home. One of the key factors when it comes to healthy family and romantic relationships, it would seem, is psychological flexibility.
Cornered by a dangerous predator, a gecko can self-amputate its still twitching tail, creating a fleeting moment of distraction – a chance for the lizard to flee with its life. Small reptiles such as geckos and skinks are well known for this remarkable ability to sacrifice and then rapidly regrow their tails. Now, to scientists’ surprise,
Although the ground beneath our feet feels solid and reassuring (most of the time), nothing in this Universe lasts forever. One day, our Sun will die, ejecting a large proportion of its mass before its core shrinks down into a white dwarf, gradually leaking heat until it’s nothing more than a cold, dark, dead lump
Thousands of years ago, ancient Egyptians were laid to rest in Saqqara, an ancient city of the dead. Priests placed them inside wooden boxes adorned with hieroglyphics, and the sarcophagi were sealed and buried in tombs scattered above and below the sand. Archaeologists have discovered 160 human coffins at the site over the last three
Nature has a way of putting our best technology to shame. For decades now, scientists have been trying to manufacture the ultimate sound absorber – a carefully engineered material that can manage acoustic waves for stealthy movement or simple peace and quiet. As it turns out, however, that cherished ‘metastructure’ may already exist in the
The periodic table of the elements, principally created by the Russian chemist, Dmitry Mendeleev (1834-1907), celebrated its 150th anniversary last year. It would be hard to overstate its importance as an organising principle in chemistry – all budding chemists become familiar with it from the earliest stages of their education. Given the table’s importance, one
Throughout all known space, between the stars and the galaxies, an extremely faint glow suffuses, a relic left over from the dawn of the Universe. This is the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the first light that could travel through the Universe when it cooled enough around 380,000 years after the Big Bang for ions and electrons
Skywatchers admiring November’s full moon will also get to see another treat: a penumbral eclipse, when the Moon passes through Earth’s outer shadow, on Monday, November 30, according to NASA. The Moon will be at its fullest for only a moment — on Monday, that happens at 4:30 am EST (9:30 UTC) — but the
First we discovered platypus would look great at a rave, now wombats, bilbies and other marsupials can join the blacklight party – with scientists unexpectedly finding they all glow wonderfully fluorescent greens, blues and pinks beneath UV light. Over the last few years scientists have found biofluorescence is more common across mammals than we realised
It seems that Earth has been misplaced. According to a new map of the Milky Way galaxy, the Solar System’s position isn’t where we thought it was. Not only is it closer to the galactic centre – and the supermassive hole therein, Sagittarius A* – it’s orbiting at a faster clip. It’s nothing to be
A dwindling tribe of chimpanzees in Guinea that gained global fame for uncanny abilities to use tools has a glimmer of hope after its last fertile female gave birth. The tiny community of apes lives in a forest around the village of Bossou, in the far southeastern corner of the country. Scientists have trekked to
The discovery of a creature described as resembling a “buck-toothed toucan” that lived some 68 million years ago has upended assumptions about diversity in the birds that lived alongside dinosaurs. At less than nine centimetres (3.5 inches) long, the delicate skull of the bird scientists have dubbed Falcatakely forsterae might be easily overlooked. In fact,
Space is a hostile place. We may have developed the technology to launch astronauts into orbit and get them home safely, but scientists are still figuring out how space travel affects human health, especially over the long haul. That’s essential before any planned missions to Mars go ahead, to assure the health and safety of
Archaeologists have uncovered a “treasure trove” of artifacts as another major ice patch melts away in the Norwegian mountains, revealing a total of 68 arrows and many more items from an ancient reindeer hunting site. The earliest finds go back some 6,000 years, according to radiocarbon dating. They include reindeer bones and antlers, as well
The question of whether a 7-million-year-old primate, nicknamed ‘Toumai,’ walked on two or four legs has whipped up drama amongst palaeontologists – complete with a vanishing femur. Since the discovery of Sahelanthropus tchadensis’s first fossil back in 2001, it has often been cited as our earliest known hominin ancestor. Initial analysis suggested that Sahelanthropus regularly walked upright
The surface of the Sun is a turbulent dance of gravity, plasma, and magnetic fields. Much like the weather on Earth, its behavior can seem unpredictable, but there are patterns to be found when you look closely. The first pattern to be observed on the solar surface was that of sunspots. Sunspots were noticed by
For a long time, Hawai’i Island has been home to a mystery. Somehow, the amount of freshwater in underground aquifers has seemed much smaller than it should be, given the amount of rainfall. Scientists have just found out why. Deep underground, running below the island’s coast, vast quantities of freshwater are transported from the flanks of
The largest sharks ever to have roamed the oceans parked their young in shallow, warm-water nurseries where food was abundant and predators scarce until they could assume their title as kings and queens of the sea. But as sea levels declined in a cooling world, the brutal mega-predator, Otodus megalodons, may have found fewer and
An Egyptian mummy that was decorated with a woman’s portrait contained a surprise – the body of a child who was only 5 years old when she died. Now, scientists have learned more about the mysterious girl and her burial, thanks to high-resolution scans and X-ray ”microbeams” that targeted very small regions in the intact artifact. Computed X-ray tomography (CT)
In June of 1670 – almost exactly 350 years ago – French astronomer Voituret Anthelme recorded a ‘new’ star in the sky. In the Northern constellation of Vulpecula, a pinpoint of light flared into brightness before gradually fading from view with the naked eye over a year later. The event was classified as a nova,
An extremely magnetised star 16,700 light-years away could be the next clue in solving the mystery of fast radio bursts. In data from observations of the magnetar 1E 1547.0-5408 taken in 2009, astronomers have just discovered a pair of bursts of radio emission that look incredibly similar to bursts from SGR 1935+2154 – a magnetar
Who embedded a large metal monolith in the remote Utah desert? State wildlife officials are scratching their heads after discovering a bizarre 10-foot-tall (3 meters) installation in Red Rock Country in southeastern Utah. The shiny silver rectangle sits in the center of the dead end of one of the many shallow rock ravines that scour this desert
Two of Charles Darwin’s notebooks containing his pioneering ideas on evolution and his famous “Tree of Life” sketch are missing, believed stolen, the Cambridge University Library said on Tuesday. The British scientist filled the leather notebooks in 1837 after returning from his voyage on the HMS Beagle. The library said they were worth millions of
Before we start mining for precious metals in the darkness of the deep sea, we might try switching on the light first and observing our surroundings. In this seemingly isolated abyss, at deeper than 3,000 metres (9,800 ft) below sea level, scientists were able to coax a massive swarm of 115 cutthroat eels (Ilyophis arx)
How might The Terminator have played out if Skynet had decided it probably wasn’t responsible enough to hold the keys to the entire US nuclear arsenal? As it turns out, scientists may just have saved us from such a future AI-led apocalypse, by creating neural networks that know when they’re untrustworthy. These deep learning neural
When a dead thresher shark washed up onshore, it was obvious what had killed it – a swordfish had stabbed it from behind and left a large hunk of its “sword” embedded in the beast, a new study finds. No one saw the actual attack, so it’s unclear why the swordfish jabbed the shark. But
For decades, planetary geologists have studied tiny chunks of lunar rock to unravel the Moon’s mysteries. The rocks have revealed how old the Moon is, helped scientists estimate the age of other planets, and offered insight into how turbulent our Solar System once was. But nobody has collected any new Moon rocks for more than 40 years.
Ants are pretty organised little creatures. Highly social insects, they know how to forage, build complicated nests, steal your pantry snacks, and generally look after the queens and the colony, all by working together. Leaf-cutter ants turn that cooperation up several notches. Leaf-cutter ant colonies like Acromyrmex echinatior can contain millions of ants, split into
When stars like the Sun reach the end of their lives, the object that remains is a white dwarf. This is the star’s shrunken, naked core, no longer capable of nuclear fusion. It shines, but only with residual heat, slowly cooling over billions of years until it’s completely cold and dark. But not all white
The mighty Arecibo telescope will be closed forever, the US National Science Foundation has decided. But the radio telescope which brought us confirmation of the first exoplanet in 1992 will undoubtedly live on in the hearts and minds of scientists, many of who took to social media to mourn the end of an era and to
Just before going into a hallucinogenic trance, Indigenous Californians who had gathered in a cave likely looked up toward the rocky ceiling, where a pinwheel and big-eyed moth were painted in red. This mysterious “pinwheel,” is likely a depiction of the delicate, white flower of Datura wrightii, a powerful hallucinogen that the Chumash people took not
We’ve seen evidence that COVID-19 lockdowns have reduced at least some forms of pollution, temporarily – but the overall picture remains disturbingly grim, according to new figures from the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). The WMO says that there will be a reduction in global CO2 emissions for 2020 – but that it won’t
The origins of life, a few billion years ago, were humble. Single-celled organisms squirming in the ooze, over millions and billions of years developing into multi-celled plants and, eventually, animals. But when and how these evolutionary spurts occurred has been difficult to puzzle out. Organic material doesn’t necessarily preserve well, and when it does, we
Every now and then, Earth reminds us it’s capable of releasing some furious energy. Case in point: scientists have just detected a new extreme in hotspots of lightning activity called ‘superbolts’: intense lightning strikes that shine up to 1,000 times brighter than typical lightning strikes. The observations come from researchers at the US Los Alamos
We often hear about people being “in the zone” when they have excelled, be it at sport, playing music, video gaming, or going for a run. For decades, researchers have tried to find out what the zone is and how to enter it. And the assumption has been that there is one zone that we
In the dusty desert town of Woomera, in the South Australian desert, scientists are getting ready. On 6 December 2020, after six years in space, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft will finally return to Earth. It carries with it a cargo unbelievably rare, precious, and hard-won – at least 100 milligrams of material
The remains of two victims of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius almost 2,000 years ago have been unearthed at a grand villa on the fringes of Pompeii, officials at the archaeological site said Saturday. “Two skeletons of individuals caught in the fury of the eruption have been found,” the officials at the Italian site near
On Wednesday night, around 100 kilometres (60 miles) south of Australia’s Tasmanian coast, those on board the research vessel Investigator witnessed something amazing. At 9:21 pm local time, a bright green meteor streaked across the sky before breaking up over the Tasman Sea – disappearing from view in just a few short seconds. If anything
Star-gazers are in for a treat over Christmas, as Jupiter and Saturn will get closer to each other in Earth’s night sky than they have been for nearly 800 years. Set up your telescope, hope for a clear night, and get ready. The celestial synchronisation has been in the works since summer as Jupiter and
As our need for electronic gadgets and sensors grows, scientists are coming up with new ways to keep devices powered for longer on less energy. The latest sensor to be invented in the lab can go for a whole year on a single burst of energy, aided by a physics phenomenon known as quantum tunnelling.
In July of 2015, NASA’s New Horizons probe made history when it became the first mission ever to conduct a close flyby of Pluto. This was followed by the spacecraft making the first-ever encounter with a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) – known as Arrokoth (AKA 2014 MU69) – on 31 December 2018. In addition, its unique position in the outer Solar System has
Microplastics of our own making are turning up in the rain, wind, soil, and snow of the most remote and mountainous regions on our planet. First they were found in the French Pyrenees. Then it was the North American Rocky Mountains. Now it’s Nepal’s Sagarmāthā National Park – home of Mount Everest, the tallest peak
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- Next Page »