Human societies are so prosperous mostly because of how altruistic we are. Unlike other animals, people cooperate even with complete strangers. We share knowledge on Wikipedia, we show up to vote, and we work together to responsibly manage natural resources. But where do these cooperative skills come from and why don’t our selfish instincts overwhelm
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Not so long ago, Mars had a bunch of methane in its atmosphere. And then it didn’t. Either a whole lot of research is just plain wrong, or we have one heck of a mystery on our hands. Coincidentally, while one group of researchers double checked their sums, other researchers have stumbled on results that
For a year, between March 2015 and March 2016, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly spent his life in the microgravity environment aboard the International Space Station, hundreds of kilometres above Earth. His identical twin and fellow astronaut, Mark, stayed down here. This was a unique opportunity. The Kelly brothers are genetically identical, which meant scientists had
Things are not looking good for Earth’s glaciers. Usually, when it comes to climate change and melting ice, we think of the Earth’s polar regions. But they’re not the only important ice formations, and they’re not the only ice that’s melting due to climate change. New research published on 8 April 2019 shows that the
Katherine Bouman had a secret: An algorithm she’d developed had stitched together a picture of a black hole. She told nobody except her colleagues. Until today. That’s when Event Horizon Telescope team, of which Bouman is a member, unveiled the first image of a black hole. Bouman, 29, a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center
By now, we’ve all seen the history-making snapshot of the supermassive black hole at the centre of galaxy M87 staring back at us like the flaming eye of a vengeful god. It’s a powerful image. Makes you feel tiny. Really tiny. Not feeling it? Maybe you just need to comprehend the scale of this thing.
Black holes are long-time superstars of science fiction. But their Hollywood fame is a little strange, given that no-one has ever actually seen one – at least, until now. If you needed to see to believe, then thank the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which has just produced the first ever direct image of a black
No. Stop. Scroll back up. Look at that picture. Stop scrolling down and look again. What you’re looking at is history. That is the very first direct image, ever, of the event horizon of a black hole. It’s 55 million light-years away, and it’s the supermassive black hole at the centre of a giant elliptical
Since 2006, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) consortium has been working on producing the world’s first-ever photographs of the event horizon of a black hole. Now they’re just about to present their first result, described as “groundbreaking” by the European Research Council, and we are beyond excited! Our live blog coverage starts below, and you
Archaeologists just pried another secret of our past from the clutches of the earth, welcoming a new human species to our growing family tree. This discovery began with an ancient foot, or what was left of one. A foot bone, called the third metatarsal, was found in the Callao Cave on the Philippine island of
For 430 million years, nestled in some rocks in England, Cthulhu waited, dreaming. Now it’s finally seen the light of day, and it’s honestly a lot smaller than we were expecting. This fossilised Cthulhu is related to sea cucumbers, and dates back to the Silurian period, when the first bony fish appeared. Its three-centimetre (1.1
The European Southern Observatory has revealed that on April 10 there will be a huge announcement. Yes, we know how that sounds – but as far as we can tell, it appears the world is about to finally see the first ever photo of a black hole‘s event horizon. Of course, we won’t know for
A team of scientists says they’ve built a quantum computer that generates a superposition of several possible futures the computer could experience. The research, published Tuesday in Nature Communications, describes how this quantum system could help futuristic artificial intelligence learn much faster than it can today – and it could mean quantum computers are finally
Lately, the Weather Channel has been splashing out on some seriously disturbing graphics, and the channel’s most recent immersion experience is absolutely brimming with disaster. The roughly two-minute-long, mixed-reality segment takes viewers on a journey to the year 2100, when the streets of Charleston, South Carolina are perennially flooded, rendering parts of the city uninhabitable.
In 1996, over 20 years ago, then US President Bill Clinton made a short speech on what was, at the time, a monumental discovery: one that would someday launch a whole new field of science, called astrobiology. Embedded in a Martian meteorite, NASA scientists had that day said there could be evidence of a possible sign
A pair of mathematicians from Australia and France have devised a new way to multiply numbers together, while solving an algorithmic puzzle that has perplexed some of the greatest math minds for almost half a century. For most of us, the way we multiply relatively small numbers is by remembering our times tables – an
It wasn’t ash that killed the victims of volcano Vesuvius in Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 CE. It wasn’t lava. It was something called pyroclastic flows – extremely hot clouds of volcanic gas and debris that can move at insane speeds. Pyroclastic flow speeds are so intense, they seem to defy the laws of physics,
One of the scariest – and most troubling – iPhone problems is when your phone will not charge. But don’t panic. There are some fairly mundane reasons why this might happen, and they’re generally easy to solve. On the other hand, keep in mind that to do something even as simple as charge your phone,
Matter takes many shapes, but most of us are familiar with the basic three states – solid, liquid, and gas. Now, for the first time, scientists have discovered that it’s possible for matter to exist in two of these states at once. Specifically, the metal potassium can be a solid and a liquid simultaneously, if
For the last twenty-some years, the International Space Station (ISS) has seen hundreds of astronauts come and go. Yet even after all these years, a little part of each visitor remains, like a signature in the station’s guest book. The most extensive microbial inventory to date has now found an astonishing diversity of germs on
The idea of balancing forces comes up again and again in our society, from the idea of yin and yang to any one of the growing number of Star Wars movies. Now scientists have identified three key positive motivations that drive us, and they’re calling it the Light Triad. There’s already a widely recognised Dark
Cats have a reputation for being aloof, and that reputation is only going to get stronger after scientific results from Japan revealed the true extent to which they have been ignoring us all this time. While dog owners have to do very little to get the eager-to-please attention of their good boys and girls, cats
Later this week, we may be seeing our very first photographs of a black hole’s event horizon. But other projects are also hard at work – astronomers have just managed to take the first-ever direct image of the dusty torus surrounding a very active supermassive black hole. Some galaxies – aptly called radio galaxies - contain highly
It’s one of the most enduring mysteries of the Sun: why the superheated surface of this great ball of glowing plasma is actually cooler than its outer atmosphere, called the corona. Scientists now have a new explanation for this hotly debated topic, and the answer was hidden in a strange solar phenomenon that’s never been
When artificial intelligence systems start getting creative, they can create great things – and scary ones. Take, for instance, an AI program that let web users compose music along with a virtual Johann Sebastian Bach by entering notes into a program that generates Bach-like harmonies to match them. Run by Google, the app drew great
Researchers last week captured and killed the largest Burmese python to be removed from Big Cypress National Preserve in the Florida Everglades, according to wildlife officials. The 17-foot (5.1-meter), 140-pound (63.5-kilogram) female snake – an invasive species devastating to native wildlife – was discovered using a new tracking approach that leans on technology and the
Two successful rocket launches in Norway on Friday have left locals stunned, confused, and in awe of an incredible artificial light show. After two orange dots launched through the air, expanding glowing clouds and colourful lights appeared suddenly – but it was not an alien attack, as some outlets have been suggesting. Instead, the rockets were
It looks like another space rock has exploded over Russia. At around 7 pm local time on April 6, a meteor turned into a fireball over the industrial town of Krasnoyarsk in Siberia, according to The Siberian Times. Residents caught the event on dashcams as the meteor streaked across the sky – an orange fireball
Japan’s space agency said it successfully dropped a small bomb on an asteroid on Friday as part of its mission to better understand the history of the Solar System. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said its Hayabusa2 spacecraft detonated the copper explosive, also known as the Small Carry-on Inspector (SCI), on the Ryugu asteroid
Five suspected poachers entered Kruger National Park in South Africa last week to kill rhinos living there, according to authorities. Only four of the men left alive. The fifth was killed by an elephant and later “devoured” by a pride of lions, park officials said in a statement. “Entering Kruger National Park illegally and on
Researchers have spotted a miniature stomach, duodenum, and small intestine hidden among the cells of lung tumor samples. Tumors are notoriously mixed up; cells from one part often express different genes and adopt different sizes and shapes than cells from another part of that same tumor. This discovery back in 2018 was still a surprise,
You might not think about it much, but water is super weird. It doesn’t behave like any other liquid. And scientists think they have figured out why – and it has to do with the strange arrangement of its molecules. One of the weirdest aspects of water is its unusual density. Normally, liquids become increasingly
Linus Torvalds, the Linux creator who’s himself known for angry tirades, said that if he could fix one thing about the internet, it would be modern social media — a flame-spitting recrimination by the inventor of the software that keeps much of the social web running. “I absolutely detest modern media — Twitter, Facebook, Instagram,”
Whether loved ones or strangers, wild gorillas in the forests of Rwanda and Congo appear to be fascinated by their dead. Researchers have now recorded three instances of these creatures gathering around, and sometimes even on, gorilla corpses – staring, sniffing, licking, touching, and grooming them for minutes on end. The first two sightings were
The bronze weapons of the famous Terracotta Army in China have been remarkably well preserved over the last 2,000 or so years. So well preserved, in fact, that up until now there have been hypotheses that ancient China had some kind of high-tech preservation technique that kept them in such good condition. Now scientists think
What once seemed like the moonshot vision of tech billionaires and idealistic architects could soon become a concrete solution to several of the world’s most pressing challenges. At a United Nations roundtable on Wednesday, a group of builders, engineers, and architects debuted a concept for an affordable floating city. Unlike instances in the past when
A family pet is being nursed back to health after it was found abandoned, malnourished and living in “deplorable” conditions, which had led to disease, authorities said. Authorities said the animal was discovered in a vacated home last month in Wilmington, a port city in North Carolina. The pet? A freshwater fish. The former owner,
Just because the Mars rovers are all the way over on the Red Planet, that doesn’t mean they don’t get to enjoy a bit of eclipse fun. And with two moons on rapid orbits, Mars sees a lot of eclipses. Now NASA’s Curiosity rover has sent home videos of Martian moons Phobos and Deimos (Fear
Only four men alive today have walked on the Moon. Last month, three of them got together in the same room. NASA’s Apollo program ran 17 missions, which are best known for putting the first people on the Moon in 1969. Humanity hasn’t set foot on the Moon since NASA’s Apollo 17 mission in December
President Donald Trump of the United States of America has made quite the interesting claim. At the National Republican Congressional Committee fundraising dinner earlier this week, he took a tilt at windmills. “If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value,” he said. “And they
Welcome to Saturn, as you’ve probably never seen it. It’s always awe-inspiring to see the clockwork motion of the heavens, transpire in real time. In a slow motion Universe, occultations give us the chance to see the cosmos pull off a celestial hat-trick. This can appear as a split second-type of event – such as
Whales belong in the ocean, right? That may be true today, but cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises) actually descended from four legged mammals that once lived on land. New research published in Current Biology reports the discovery in Peru of an entirely new species of ancestral whale that straddled land and sea, providing insight into the
The year 2019 is here. With it, we’ve been promised a splendid moment in astronomy. For years, the Event Horizon Telescope has been working to bring us the first ever telescopic photograph of the event horizon of a black hole. Indeed, for all their popularity in public imagination, we have never actually seen a black
This is what will happen when our Sun dies: First, the hydrogen-powered nuclear reactor in its center will run out of fuel. The Sun will expand into a red giant, swelling to 100 times its size and swallowing Mercury, Venus and perhaps even our own planet, along with all life as we know it. Next,
The scientific method cannot be bought. But that hasn’t stopped some publishers from trying. By preying on up-and-coming scientists who are desperate to publish or perish, these so-called predatory journals will print just anything for the right price. It’s a modern threat to the reliability of scientific research, and the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is
There are a lot of different ways to look at our planet’s warming climate – such as more extreme weather events, increasing levels of vegetation in the Arctic, and even shifting seasons. Now we just got a new metric showing the severity of the situation. A group of scientists have came together to discuss what
It could be a landscape on an alien world. Strange optical effects and dazzling mineral formations bloom on the edge of water so hot it would be steam if not for the pressure of all that deep ocean above it. Researchers on board the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research vessel Falkor recently captured some amazing snapshots
Getting around in a city can be a lot more dangerous than wide open spaces, and that, it seems, is true for migratory birds as well, especially if they’re in the habit of calling out to each other at night. A new study has analysed the deaths of 70,000 songbirds that died after colliding with
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