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
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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
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
Aurora – the dancing glow of ionised particles in Earth’s upper atmosphere – is not unique to our planet. The phenomenon has been spotted shining in the atmospheres of every other planet except Mercury. Even Jupiter’s moons Ganymede and Europa have auroras. Never, until now, had an aurora been detected on a comet. But, in
Two extremely rare Javan rhinoceros calves have been spotted in an Indonesian national park, boosting hopes for the future of one of the world’s most endangered mammals. The rhino calves – a female named Helen and male called Luther – were seen with their mothers in footage taken from nearly 100 camera traps installed in
To human eyes, Saturn’s moon Enceladus looks relatively plain. Shift the wavelength away from the optical, however, and Enceladus starts to look a lot more interesting, as new images amply demonstrate. Although its surface is scored with deep chasms and gorges, Enceladus seems fairly uniform otherwise, with a glistening white ice shell, like a giant snowball
According to the IUCN Red List 32,000 species are threatened with extinction – everything from birds and mammals, to reef corals and crustaceans. And that’s only the species we know about. But although we might be working hard to help some species come back from the brink, we might also be eating some threatened species without even
The fall equinox comes this Tuesday at 9:30 am ET (1:30 pm UTC). Although not the best time to balance an egg (that’s an old wives’ tale), the equinox heralds the coming of autumn, cooler temperatures, and shorter days for the Northern Hemisphere, which houses about 90 percent of Earth’s population. For the Southern Hemisphere, it signifies the opposite: warmer
Egypt’s antiquities ministry announced Sunday the discovery of 14 sarcophagi in the Saqqara necropolis south of Cairo that had lain buried for 2,500 years. The coffins were found two days ago during an archaeological dig at the burial spot where another 13 wooden sarcophagi had been discovered last week, the ministry said in a statement.
Human-made plastic isn’t just flooding the world’s oceans, it’s also piling up on the land and in the soil. For years now, the synthetic microfibres woven into our clothing have been leaching into the environment. Even when we don’t throw away our clothes or when we buy them secondhand, wastewater from our washing machines can
How long does it take Earth to complete a 360-degree rotation? Not quite 24 hours, it turns out – it’s precisely 23 hours and 56 minutes. But because Earth is constantly moving along its orbit around the Sun, a different point on the planet faces the Sun directly at the end of that 360-degree spin.
As a species, humans have populated almost every corner of the earth. We have developed technologies and cultures which shape the world we live in. The idea of ‘natural selection’ or ‘survival of the fittest’ seems to make sense in Stone Age times when we were fighting over scraps of meat, but does it still
Scientists in Japan have developed a paper-based sensor equipped with an array of extremely tiny microneedles, which they say can painlessly penetrate human skin for a quick and easy method of conducting diagnostic tests for conditions like pre-diabetes. Microneedles are super tiny-spikes so small they’re measured in micrometres (one thousandth of a millimetre), designed to
The world’s most advanced telescopes were not made for today’s temperatures, and it’s messing with our observations of the night sky. Three decades-worth of data from the Paranal Observatory in northern Chile – home of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) – has revealed several ways in which climate change is already impacting
Magnetism and electricity are linked together in many weird and wonderful ways throughout science, including the fascinating magnetoelectric effect noticeable in some crystals – where the electrical properties of a crystal can be influenced by a magnetic field, and vice versa. Now things have gotten even weirder, because scientists have discovered a brand new magnetoelectric
The Earth’s biosphere contains all the known ingredients necessary for life as we know it. Broadly speaking these are: liquid water, at least one source of energy, and an inventory of biologically useful elements and molecules. But the recent discovery of possibly biogenic phosphine in the clouds of Venus reminds us that at least some
Two experiments hunting for a whisper of a particle that prevents whole galaxies from flying apart recently published some contradictory results. One came up empty handed, while the other gives us every reason to keep on searching. Dark bosons are dark matter candidates based on force-carrying particles that don’t really pack much force. Unlike the
Astronomers have painstakingly built models of the asteroid population, and those models predict that there will be ~1 km sized asteroids that orbit closer to the Sun than Venus does. The problem is, nobody’s been able to find one. Until now. Astronomers working with the Zwicky Transient Facility say they’ve finally found one. But this one’s bigger,
Here’s how active this year’s Atlantic hurricane season has been: When Tropical Storm Wilfred formed on September 18, the National Hurricane Center exhausted its list of storm names for only the second time since naming began in 1950. Within hours, two more storm had formed – now known as Alpha and Beta. Even more surprising
Making educated guesses is something we all do every day – but until now scientists haven’t fully understood how these leaps in logic are processed in the brain. Now new research on mice and humans suggests neurons can effectively ‘join the dots’ between two thoughts to figure something out. If you’re looking for a friend
The last gasps of dying stars are some of the most beautiful objects in the galaxy. They’re called planetary nebulae, clouds of stellar material ejected out into space as a red giant star enters the last stage of its life. The dying star shucks off its outer layers, which are illuminated from within by the
Around 120,000 years ago in what is now northern Saudi Arabia, a small band of Homo sapiens stopped to drink and forage at a shallow lake that was also frequented by camels, buffalo, and elephants bigger than any species seen today The people may have hunted the large mammals but they did not stay long,
Majestic Jupiter, our Solar System’s belligerent big brother, is putting its best side forward*. A sharp new image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the giant planet’s wild, ever-evolving weather – revealing both short- and long-term changes. In the northern hemisphere, turbulent clouds could indicate the formation of a new swirling storm, while down south,
We’re still a long way from realising the full potential of quantum computing, but scientists are making progress all the time – and as a sign of what might be coming, IBM now says it expects to have a 1,000 qubit machine up and running by 2023. Qubits are the quantum equivalents of classical computing
Australia is home to some of the world’s most dangerous wildlife. Anyone who spends time outdoors in eastern Australia is wise to keep an eye out for snakes, spiders, swooping birds, crocodiles, deadly cone snails and tiny toxic jellyfish. But what not everybody knows is that even some of the trees will get you. Our
What is a Viking? The word conjures an unmistakable mental image: the stereotype of bold Scandinavian invaders, fearsome marauders with white skin and pale hair, ruthlessly raiding and voyaging their way across the globe over 1,000 years ago. Only, there is a mistake after all, it seems – crucial details in this longstanding legend are
Scientists call it the doomsday glacier. That’s partly because the Thwaites, a Britain-sized glacier in western Antarctica, is melting at an alarming rate: It’s retreating by about half a mile (2,625 feet) per year. Scientists estimate the glacier will lose all of its ice in about 200 to 600 years. When it does, it will raise
Astronomers have discovered a planet the size of Jupiter closely orbiting the smouldering remains of a dead star, the first time that an intact exoplanet has been discovered travelling around a white dwarf, according to research published Wednesday. Researchers said the fate of this giant planet, called WD 1586 b, offers a potential vision of
The spread of humans out of Africa through the Middle East may have been helped along by a very ordinary substance: dust. More specifically, the silty sediment known as loess seems to have played a crucial role in making the Southern Levant, on the east coast of the Mediterranean, such a fertile and hospitable corridor of
High above the Arctic Circle lies a group of remote Siberian islands where ivory traders and scientists brave sub-zero temperatures to search for extinct creatures preserved in the melting permafrost. Those Lyakhovsky Islands just yielded an unprecedented find: a perfectly preserved adult cave bear - with its nose, teeth, and internal organs still intact. Scientists think the
A sudden and potentially unprecedented mass die-off of migratory birds in New Mexico and elsewhere appears to have killed hundreds of thousands of birds, and perhaps even millions, scientists estimate. In recent weeks, biologists and ornithologists have watched in shock and despair as hundreds of dead birds were discovered in numerous spots across the New
Far from the woes of planet Earth, our Sun has been having a rather quiet year. A close look at its activity confirms what solar enthusiasts have been suspecting for a while – our closest star has entered a new cycle. Ever since we started to track the Sun’s dark blemishes in earnest, humans have noticed
Countries are set to miss all of the targets they set themselves a decade ago to preserve nature and save Earth’s vital biodiversity, the United Nations (UN) said Tuesday. Humanity’s impact on the natural world over the last five decades has been nothing short of cataclysmic: since 1970 close to 70 percent of wild animals,
A 100-million-year-old chunk of amber has revealed the oldest-ever sample of animal sperm, and each individual cell is enormously long. Even more impressive, this giant sperm – several times larger than human sperm – comes from a shrimp-like crustacean smaller than a poppyseed. Just shy of 0.6 millimetres, this ancient bivalve belongs to a still-living
When humanity finally detected the collision between two neutron stars in 2017, we confirmed a long-held theory – in the energetic fires of these incredible explosions, elements heavier than iron are forged. And so, we thought we had an answer to the question of how these elements – including gold – propagated throughout the Universe.
We don’t know exactly how they do it, we just know it’s an amazing gift. For decades, evidence has shown that all sorts of animals can sense magnetic fields and even use them to navigate their way around the planet. This mysterious ability, called magnetoreception, is something that helps animals to make long-haul migrations, or
During a hot summer night in the Australian state of New South Wales, ecologist Heloise Gibb and her team were hunting for scorpions in some arid scrubland. Using special UV-proof glasses and UV flashlights, they were looking for a flicker of fluorescence indicating a scorpion, which have become abundant in the damaged, sandy deserts of
Uranus, far from Earth in the darker region of the Solar System’s planetary reach, isn’t alone. It’s accompanied by a retinue of moons – 27, to be precise. Far and dim, these moons are difficult to study, but astronomers have made an accidental discovery while observing Uranus. According to infrared images of the five main
A massive chunk of ice – larger than the city of Paris – has broken off from the Arctic’s largest ice shelf because of warmer temperatures in Greenland, scientists said Monday. The 113-square-kilometre (43-square-mile) block broke off the Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden glacier in Northeast Greenland, which the scientists said had been expected given the rising average temperatures.
From bird feathers to fruit skins, the natural world has two main ways of displaying colour: through pigment substances that provide selective colour absorption, or through structural colour – the use of microscopic structures to control light reflection. Now scientists have devised a computer model that explains why the brightest matte structural colours in nature
Here in the Solar System, we have quite an interesting variety of planets, but they are limited by the composition of our Sun. Since the planets, moons, asteroids and other bodies are made out of what was left over after the Sun was finished forming, their chemistry is thought to be related to our host.
Venus, the Evening Star, may gleam prettily in our night sky, but up close it’s about as inhospitable as a rocky planet can be, with sulphuric acid rains, a suffocating CO2 atmosphere, and a surface atmospheric pressure up to 100 times greater than Earth’s. Based on our understanding of life on Earth, Venus would be among
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