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
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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
Divers from Finland have made an unexpected discovery while exploring the depths of the Baltic Sea, finding an incredibly well-preserved shipwreck dating back almost 400 years. Volunteer divers from the non-profit Badewanne team more often come across wrecked 20th century relics sunk during the sea battles of World War I and WWII, so uncovering what
A leading expert on indigenous peoples in Brazil was shot dead with an arrow apparently fired by a member of an isolated tribe in the Amazon rainforest, officials and a journalist in the region said Thursday. Rieli Franciscato, 56, the head of a program to protect indigenous groups that have little or no contact with
Just when you think orcas couldn’t possible be any more awesome, they get even better. A study in 2019 showed these whales are really good at scaring off the most feared beast in the sea. Yep. Orcas have toppled the great white shark off their ‘apex predator’ throne. A team of marine scientists found that
In the past decade, the study of exoplanets has grown by leaps and bounds. At present, a total of 4,201 planets have been confirmed beyond the Solar System and another 5,481 candidates await confirmation. In the midst of all this, M-type red dwarf stars have become a focus of exoplanet research because they appear to be the most likely
At first, the idea of a walking fish sounds ridiculous – but such hybrid creatures have played a key role in the evolution of the animal kingdom on Earth. Now, new research has shown that more fish than we ever realised may be able to walk about on land. That’s according to a detailed study
Whether it’s robots working in a disaster area, autonomous cars getting around town, or satellites peering down through space, having machines that can see through clouds, haze and fog is incredibly useful – and scientists may have just made the best system yet. The newly developed system works via an algorithm that measures the movement
For the better part of a century, the world’s greatest minds have struggled with the mathematical certainty that objects can be in multiple positions at the same time before something causes them to snap into place. A number of physicists have wondered if good old gravity is responsible for forcing the particle equivalent of a
There are competing hypotheses around the decline of the Indus Valley Civilization in South Asia some 3,000 years ago, but a new mathematical proof has identified that climate change could have been responsible. Mathematical scientist Nishant Malik from the Rochester Institute of Technology crunched the numbers and found new evidence to back up the idea
Jupiter’s moons are hotter than they really should be, some 778 million kilometres (483 million miles) away from the Sun. It had been thought that most of this extra warmth was provided by Jupiter itself, but now there’s a new hypothesis: they’re heating each other. Jupiter isn’t acting as a roaring campfire for its surrounding
Picking the kids up from school takes on a different meaning for crocodylian parents. In this photo, taken by India-based photographer Dhritiman Mukherjee, a male freshwater gharial shows us why. Bobbing in the waters of northern India’s National Chambal Sanctuary, the croc waits as more than 100 of his month-old children clamber onto his back for safe
In the salt water marshes of southern California, a splashing killifish is easy prey for a hungry shorebird. Like a jerking marionette, the helpless creature shimmies and flashes on the surface of the water. And all the while, hiding deep in its brain, an invisible other quietly pulls the strings. The puppeteer in question is
According to ancient legend, a beautiful maiden named Ashima drowned in a river, and turned into stone. This, it has been said for centuries, is how China’s stunning Stone Forest of Shilin first took shape. According to new research, however, there’s another explanation for the phenomenon that gives stone forests their surreal and otherworldly forms,
NASA on Thursday announced it was in the market for Moon rocks, and wants to pay companies to scoop out the dirt, take a photo, and then have it ready for collection by a future mission. The contract doesn’t actually involve getting to the Moon itself – a feat only achieved by the national space
It would be extremely optimistic to suggest that we have a good handle on dark matter. But even the slight grasp we do have may be missing something important. New observations from the Hubble Space Telescope have found much higher concentrations of dark matter than expected in some galaxies, by over an order of magnitude.
Often it’s the most minute scientific measurements that are the most important, and researchers have developed a new, super-small device that’s capable of detecting magnetic fields even when they’re extremely faint. The device, a new kind of superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID), is just 10 nanometres high, or around a thousandth of the thickness of a human
Jupiter, thick with chaotic clouds and raging with wild winds, is famous and beloved for its gloriously stormy atmosphere. Ever since the Juno space probe arrived there in 2016, we’ve had unprecedented access that’s been helping us understand what drives the gas giant’s insane weather. But Juno has delivered not just answers, but also more questions.
Sixty-six million years ago, after a massive asteroid hit Earth with the explosive energy of roughly 1 billion nuclear bombs, a shroud of ash, dust and vaporized rock covered the sky and slowly rained down on the planet. As plant and animal species died en masse, tiny undersea amoebas called forams continued to reproduce, building sturdy shells out of
Like Jörmungandr encircling Earth, so too is the entire galaxy ringed. A huge, high-velocity stream of gas is wrapped most of the way around the Milky Way, at a distance of around 200,000 light-years. We know where it comes from, more or less. It’s been linked pretty conclusively with the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds,
Our cells still hold tightly onto many secrets about their origins. But recently discovered giant viruses may hold clues to one such secret – the mysterious emergence of a cell’s main store of instructions, the nucleus. The presence of a nucleus distinguishes our eukaryotic cells from other cellular life forms. Bacteria and archaea tend to
For tens of thousands of years, a Neanderthal molar rested in a shallow grave on the floor of the Stajnia Cave in what is now Poland. For all that time, viable mitochondrial DNA remained locked inside – and now, finally, scientists are discovering its secrets. Labelled Stajnia S5000, the tooth belonged to a Neanderthal who
Global animal, bird and fish populations have plummeted more than two-thirds in less than 50 years due to rampant over-consumption, experts said Thursday in a stark warning to save nature in order to save ourselves. Human activity has severely degraded three quarters of all land and 40 percent of Earth’s oceans, and our quickening destruction
San Francisco residents awoke on Wednesday to discover a glowing orange sky. Smoke from wildfires has been covering San Francisco for weeks, but the layer that blew in on Wednesday morning was much thicker. And as the day wore on, the sky took on a darker hue of orange, making life in the city at
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