Thousands of years of history tell us drought is nothing new. Sometimes we prevail. Often we don’t. A bleak look into the future tells us we’ve seen nothing yet, with a mix of shifting climates, poor water management practices, and growing population densities promising a ‘pandemic‘ of catastrophic droughts awaits. The UN’s Special Report on Drought
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Insects are the most numerous group of animals on the planet. There are an estimated 5.5 million species, 80 percent of which remain to be discovered. Yet insects are experiencing steep, widespread declines across the world: a “death by a thousand cuts” because of human activity. Insects perform almost every role imaginable in an ecosystem,
The Universe is a large place, and there are a lot of large things in it. Not just galaxies, but groupings of galaxies, and the cosmic web that connects them all together. Scientists have just discovered what appears to be one of these groupings, and it could have serious implications for our understanding of the
Charles Darwin was a careful scientist. In the middle of the 19th century, while he was collecting evidence for his theory that species evolve by natural selection, he noticed it didn’t explain the fancy tails of male peacocks, the antlers paraded by male deer, or why some the males of some species are far larger
A giant ‘murder hornet’ has just been found in a new part of the United States. The dead insect was discovered in a county of Washington state just north of Seattle by a member of the public in early June. DNA testing has since confirmed it is an Asian giant hornet, or Vespa mandarinia. Because
The first astronauts arrived at China’s new space station on Thursday in the country’s longest crewed mission to date, a landmark step in establishing Beijing as a major space power. The trio blasted off on a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan launch centre in northwest China’s Gobi desert, and their craft docked around seven
Very rarely is anything completely still. All normal matter in the Universe is made of humming particles, minding their own business and vibrating at their own frequencies. If we can get them to slow down as much as possible, the material enters what is known as the motional ground state. In this state, physicists can
A 26.5 million-year-old skull found in northwest China has been identified as another extinct species of giant rhino, one of the largest mammals to ever roam the land. The fossil is remarkably well-preserved, and after close analysis, scientists have named it Paraceratherium linxiaense, the sixth species of this hornless rhino genus to be uncovered in
Let me introduce you to Ophiojura, a bizarre deep-sea animal found in 2011 by scientists from the French Natural History Museum, while trawling the summit of a secluded seamount called Banc Durand, 500 metres below the waves and 200 kilometres east of New Caledonia in the southwest Pacific Ocean. Ophiojura is a type of brittle
In the far reaches of the Universe, a supermassive black hole is throwing a tantrum. It’s blowing a tremendous wind into intergalactic space, and we’re seeing the storm light from 13.1 billion years ago, when the Universe was less than 10 percent of its current age. It’s the most distant such tempest we’ve ever identified,
Stunning photographs of vast, ghostly spider webs blanketing the flood-affected region of Gippsland in Victoria have gone viral online, prompting many to muse on the wonder of nature. But what’s going on here? Why do spiders do this after floods and does it happen everywhere? The answer is: these webs have nothing to do with
Speculation has been rife about the contents of an unclassified report set to be released later this month from the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) task force. The document, expected to drop on June 25, will supposedly provide a comprehensive summary of what the US government knows about UAPs – or, to use the more popular
It’s not just seeds that are being stashed away at the poles – scientists are also preserving stacks of ancient ice for future research, and the oldest ice in the Alps region has now been successfully extracted, ready for storage in Antarctica. What makes saving and storing this ice so important is the climate history
Despite us having mapped and categorized so much of mammal biology already, there are still new surprises lying in wait. Now, scientists have found two new types of glia – a type of support cell – in mouse brains. Glial cells are usually thought of as the support act in the brain and the spinal cord, adding
It’s official: Betelgeuse sneezed and caught a cold. The cause of the star’s mysterious drop in brightness was caused by a giant cloud of dust, ejected from the red supergiant – but it could only do so because the star’s changing temperature allowed it. Betelgeuse’s Great Dimming, as the event has come to be known,
The tipping point for irreversible global warming may have already been triggered, the scientist who led the biggest-ever expedition to the Arctic warned on Tuesday. “The disappearance of summer sea ice in the Arctic is one of the first landmines in this minefield, one of the tipping points that we set off first when we
One of the best studied plants in science is a small, unassuming weed. Thale cress, or Arabidopsis thaliana, is a model organism, which basically makes it the lab rat of the plant world. Therefore, it’s quite surprising that researchers have found a whole new part of the Arabidopsis plant which we’d somehow missed for over 100 years.
Although the night sky changes very little on human timescales, the Universe is not a static place. We wheel about in motion around the galactic center. Stars are born, and die in violent explosions. Galaxies collide. And, for the first time, astronomers have just found evidence that some of the largest structures in the cosmos
The novel coronavirus may have already arrived in the US by late December 2019, adding to the evidence that the virus was already lurking here at least a month before the country’s first reported case, according to a new study. The study researchers analyzed more than 24,000 blood samples collected in the US from January 2 to
Say hello to Gunggamarandu maunala, or the “hole-headed river boss” – the biggest extinct croc yet found in Australia, and an important addition to the jigsaw of crocodylian evolution. The newly named species, known from a partial skull that was unearthed in Queensland’s Darling Downs region, belongs to a group called the tomistomines. Before this,
The main signs of COVID-19 are fever, a cough, fatigue and a loss of your sense of taste and smell. Signs of COVID-19 in the skin have been noted too. But there’s another part of the body where the virus appears to have an impact: the fingernails. Following a COVID-19 infection, for a small number
We’re all familiar with songs getting stuck in our head while we’re awake, but it turns out this can happen during sleep as well. A new study investigating the phenomenon indicates that earworms invading our brains at night could cause problems in getting to sleep and staying asleep. “Our brains continue to process music even
Earth has finally attained popular recognition for its fifth ocean, with a decision by the National Geographic Society to add the Southern Ocean around Antarctica to the four it recognizes already: the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and Arctic oceans. Although the designation of the frigid waters around the icy southern continent as a separate ocean has kicked around
Last year, a tiny fossil became big news. Trapped inside ancient amber, scientists thought they’d found the skull of a minuscule, hummingbird-like dinosaur with pointy teeth, bulging eyes, and surprisingly robust bones. It was like no ancient bird or dinosaur ever discovered before. That’s because it was actually neither. A similar skeleton found in the same
We now have a three-dimensional map of one of the boundaries of the Solar System. For the first time, astronomers have been able to determine the shape of the heliosphere, the boundary that marks the end of the influence of our star’s solar wind. This discovery could help us better understand the environment of the
At the mercy of natural selection since the dawn of life, our ancestors adapted, mated and died, passing on tiny genetic mutations that eventually made humans what we are today. But evolution isn’t bound strictly to genes anymore, a new study suggests. Instead, human culture may be driving evolution faster than genetic mutations can work. In this
New insights into the peopling of Siberia and human migration into the Americas have been found in what might seem like an unlikely place: gut bugs. Helicobacter pylori is a type of bacterium that lives in people’s digestive tracts and can cause stomach ulcers. It has evolved alongside (and inside) humans for at least the
If we’re going to tackle our microplastic pollution problem, then we need a better understanding of where these fragments and particles are – and a new study suggests that adapting satellite measurements could be one way of doing just that. At the moment, estimates of microplastics in the ocean rely on trawling specific areas with
Height varies dramatically between individuals. The tallest person ever measured was 2.72 meters (6.9 feet) tall, whilst the shortest person stood at just 67 centimeters (26 inches). We often consider our height as being unchangeable, determined by our genetic make-up from when we were conceived. After all, tall parents usually have tall children and vice
Rocket launches are noisy affairs, for sure, but the sounds they produce aren’t all audible to the human ear. As rockets leave Earth they generate infrasound, low-frequency sound waves that need special instruments to detect. And scientists have indeed been detecting them. A new study details infrasounds from 1,001 rocket launches, including Space Shuttles, Falcon
As human languages are driven to extinction around the world, a verbal encyclopedia of medical knowledge is on the brink of being forgotten. Among 12,495 medicinal uses for plants in indigenous communities, new research has found over 75 percent of those plants are each tied to just one local language. If these unique words trickle out
It’s hard to tell what’s lurking out there, in the dark voids between the stars. Evidence, however, suggests the existence of a vast population of rogue exoplanets, set adrift and tethered to no star. Far from the live-giving warmth a star provides, these lonely exoplanets are unlikely to be habitable. Their moons might be another
Camouflage techniques can usually be relied upon to conceal humans and animals alike, but expertly trained individuals can see through these visual tricks – and scientists have now learned more about how this works. Not only are trained camouflage breakers able to detect that something is hidden in a scene, they’re able to correctly assess
Humans are driving the extinction of our closest relatives on planet Earth, and if we don’t change our behavior, we may be the last great ape standing. In the worst-case scenario, where human emissions and land use continue as usual, researchers predict a 94 percent loss of great ape habitat in Africa by 2050. Even
Healthy “space pups” were born from freeze-dried mouse sperm that orbited the planet for nearly six years aboard the International Space Station (ISS), according to a new study. That’s good news because DNA-damaging radiation on the ISS is more than 100 times stronger than on Earth. Beyond the ISS, which is still shielded from some radiation by our
Imagine you’re walking into a forest, and you roll over a fallen log with your foot. Fanning out on the underside, there is something moist and yellow – a bit like something you may have sneezed out, if that something was banana-yellow and spread itself out into elegant fractal branches. What you’re looking at is
They are the hot-headed tyrants that drive the evolution of the cosmos. Black holes so large, so powerful, the energy spilled from their swirling cloaks can define the landscape of nurseries and graveyards of stars in the galaxy surrounding them. Even with masses equal to billions of suns, these gargantuan objects are still mere pinpricks in the
Your friends are on average more popular than you are, according to a phenomenon known as the “friendship paradox.” Now, a group of mathematicians has come up with a new theory that takes the friendship paradox beyond averages, and they found that their equations describe real-world popularity differences among friends. Sociologist Scott Feld first explained
A thousand years ago, two Vikings died violently. One, on the Danish island of Funen, died in his 50s, likely from a stab wound to his hip. The other died in his 20s a world away in Oxford, England, his body riddled with wounds and thrown in a mass grave. It would not be the
There’s something strange near the galactic center. Some 25,000 light-years from Earth, astronomers have found a weird star that almost blinked out of existence for several months before reappearing. Astronomers believe the star, named VVV-WIT-08, could belong to a new class of star – giant beasts over 100 times the Sun that are eclipsed by
At the age of 16, when Tony Kofi was an apprentice builder living in Nottingham, he fell from the third story of a building. Time seemed to slow down massively, and he saw a complex series of images flash before his eyes. As he described it, “In my mind’s eye I saw many, many things:
Astronomy enthusiasts rose in the early-morning hours to capture a rare glimpse at a solar eclipse. Those in the northern US as well as Canada and Greenland got the best shots of the “ring of fire” eclipse that took place Thursday morning, though the eclipse was only partial for most of the Northern Hemisphere. A sliver
COVID-19 put a spotlight on personal health and safety like perhaps only a pandemic can, but there was one place at least where people didn’t get the memo: American roads. Despite Americans driving hundreds of billions of miles less in 2020 than they did in 2019, deadly traffic accidents actually surged in the year of
As if Australia’s wonderful menagerie of strange beasties wasn’t already unique enough – with biofluorescing mammals that lay eggs and sweat milk - the delightful weirdness extends even to their nether regions. Take an echidna’s junk, for instance. I mean, just look at that magnificent four-tipped monstrosity! “They have to be quite well endowed to get around
You’ve probably seen images of scientists peering down a microscope, looking at objects invisible to the naked eye. Indeed, microscopes are indispensable to our understanding of life. They are just as indispensable to biotechnology and medicine, for instance in our response to diseases such as COVID-19. However, the best light microscopes have hit a fundamental
The rain of meteorites from space onto our planet over the last 500 million years may not have fallen in quite the way we thought. After analyzing 8,484 kilograms (18,704 pounds) of sedimentary rock from ancient seabeds, scientists have found that major collisions in the asteroid belt have not made any significant contribution to the
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced plans on Monday to fly into space next month on a rocket built by his company Blue Origin, fulfilling what he said was a lifelong dream. The 57-year-old billionaire said he and his brother Mark will blast off from Earth on July 20 on the first crewed flight of the
The Moon will blot out part of the Sun during the “ring of fire” solar eclipse on Thursday (June 10) morning. But, no one should simply gaze upward at a solar eclipse (unless the Sun is completely covered by the Moon during totality, which is NOT happening this time). So, what’s a skygazer to do? Depending on where you
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