Like the start of a horror movie, ancient creatures are emerging from the cold storage of now-melting permafrost: from incredibly preserved extinct megafauna like the woolly rhino, to the 40,000-year-old remains of a giant wolf, and bacteria over 750,000 years old. Not all of them are dead. Centuries-old moss was able to spring back to life
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Summer 2021 will mark a turning point in how heat is seen by the public and communicated by experts. For the first time in its 167-year history, the UK’s Met Office has issued an amber warning for extreme heat for much of Wales and parts of southern, central and western England, where temperatures are expected
A slice of material just a single atom thick is breaking records. The ultra-thin wafer is a magnet that operates at room temperature, opening up avenues for the development of technology, particularly memory devices, and for research into ferromagnetism and quantum physics. It’s a huge step up from previous attempts to make a 2D magnet,
The Bootleg Fire that has scorched more than 1,500 square km (600 square miles) in Oregon is so big it can be seen from space. Videos shared by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration earlier this week show smoke plumes rising into the air from the Bootleg Fire. The fire has burned over 360,000 acres, officials said. UPDATE: @NOAA‘s #GOES17🛰️ continues
Jeff Bezos just joined the very small cohort of people who have launched into space and gazed at Earth from above. The richest man on Earth briefly left the planet early Tuesday morning aboard a New Shepard rocket designed and built by Blue Origin, the spaceflight company Bezos founded in 2000. The vehicle had flown 15 times before,
Even when we mean them no harm, deer tend to be wary of humans. When we approach, they usually raise their heads, prick their ears and stand very still. It’s how these creatures stay vigilant against predators. But what happens when humans are always around? Researchers in Pennsylvania have found the presence of people threatens
A small fragment of rock found lying in a field in Gloucestershire in the UK may not have looked like much to the casual passerby, but it could contain vital information about the formation of the Solar System – and the origins of life itself. That’s because it did not form here on Earth, but
Summertime means it’s time to play ball! But what would it be like to play ball on various locations across our Solar System? Planetary scientist Dr. James O’Donoghue has put together a fun animation of how quickly an object falls on to the surfaces of places like the Sun, Earth, Ceres, Jupiter, the Moon, and
A comet that broke apart before it was due to appear in Earth’s night sky last year has now nevertheless given us a rare and wonderful gift. As its disembodied tail continued its journey through the Solar System, a spacecraft orbiting the Sun was able to pass through its tail, quite by chance. The European
Imagine a Universe where you could point a spaceship in one direction and eventually return to where you started. If our Universe were a finite donut, then such movements would be possible and physicists could potentially measure its size. “We could say: Now we know the size of the Universe,” astrophysicist Thomas Buchert, of the
Human society is on track for a collapse in the next two decades if there isn’t a serious shift in global priorities, according to a new reassessment of a 1970s report, Vice reported. In that report – published in the bestselling book The Limits to Growth (1972) – a team of MIT scientists argued that industrial civilization
By now you might have heard the factoid that modern humans share a pretty large chunk of our genomes with bananas. But delving down much deeper, how much of our genome is uniquely Homo sapiens. A new study has suggested that number could be as small as 1.5 percent, with the rest being shared with our
Artificial intelligence (AI) is proving very adept at certain tasks – like inventing human faces that don’t actually exist, or winning games of poker – but these networks still struggle when it comes to something humans do naturally: imagine. Once human beings know what a cat is, we can easily imagine a cat of a different
Two years ago, the Event Horizon Telescope gave us the first breathtaking image of the supermassive black hole at the centre of the M87 galaxy. Now, the same telescope has presented an unprecedentedly detailed view of a plasma jet being spat out by the supermassive black hole at the centre of the nearby Centaurus A
We all know the world desperately needs to transition to renewable power sources – but many of us forget we also need to make our energy systems themselves more efficient. At the moment, an estimated 70 percent of all energy we generate in the world is lost as heat – often in power plants themselves. It’s a
Mysterious strands of DNA that seemingly assimilate genes from many different organisms in their surrounding environment have been discovered in a Californian backyard. Scientists have named these elements “Borgs”, and their discovery could help us not just understand the evolution of microorganisms, but their interactions within their ecosystems, and their role in the broader environment.
Jeff Bezos, the richest person in the world, is set to join the astronaut club Tuesday on the first crewed launch by Blue Origin, another key moment in a big month for the fledgling space tourism industry. The mission comes days after Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson crossed the final frontier, narrowly besting the Amazon
NASA has finally fixed its Hubble Space Telescope after weeks of troubleshooting a mysterious glitch. On Friday, the agency announced that Hubble had successfully turned on backups to the faulty hardware that shut down its operations more than a month ago. Now NASA engineers are slowly returning the telescope to full operations. The process could take a few days.
On a hot summer day in a city, one of the best places to cool off is in a forested park. Underneath the trees, temperatures can drop significantly, both from the shadow of the canopy and from the cool ‘sweat’ released by their leaves. Even just a single tree could create a more comfortable microclimate, according
Even as awareness around plastic pollution grows, very little is being done to solve the problem. At this rate, by 2050, some experts predict the world’s oceans will contain more plastic than fish. A think piece from the United Nations, commissioned by the G20, has now detailed everything the world should do to stop that
After an impressive start, vaccination rates in the United States have begun to plateau, even though there’s more than enough medicine to go around and a dangerous variant on the loose. If the nation is to reach President Biden’s goal of vaccinating 70 percent of the public, some researchers say we need to start appealing
Many people suffer from acne during puberty and adulthood. It is often said that some foods, like chocolate, can aggravate acne. Is there any truth to this – can diet really affect acne? We asked five experts in dermatology, acne, and microbiology if diet can make acne worse; here is what they said. What is acne?
New life quite literally sparks into being, at least under fluorescence microscopy. That moment when sperm touches egg, billions of zinc atoms ignite across their now conjoined surfaces. This spectacular but minuscule phenomenon was first witnessed in human fertilization back in 2016. “It was remarkable,” said medical researcher Teresa Woodruff from Northwestern University, at the
Evidence of ancient life may have been scrubbed from parts of Mars, a new NASA study has found. The space agency’s Curiosity rover made the surprising discovery while investigating clay-rich sedimentary rocks around its landing site in Gale Crater, a former lake that was made when an asteroid struck the Red Planet roughly 3.6 billion years ago. Clay
If you’ve ever actually met a dog, new research into canine behavior will come as no shock. Scientists have found that “man’s best friend” won’t necessarily help said man out with a delicious snack, even if that man has given a snack first. This is actually a little surprising for animal researchers, though, since dogs
You’re running down the road and all of a sudden a car pulls out in front of you. In a split second your brain projects your location and predicts you will collide with the car., telling your muscles to engage in an evading maneuver. In this moment, your brain is paying more attention to where
Tiny little jumping spiders, with their magnificent eyes, seem to be able to do something we’d only ever seen before in vertebrates: distinguishing between animate and inanimate objects. In a new test, wild jumping spiders (Menemerus semilimbatus) behaved differently when presented with simulated objects of both kinds, in ways that indicated an ability to discern
The virus that causes COVID-19 was not the first pathogen to pass from animals to humans, and it surely won’t be the last. And though we may never pinpoint the exact animal source of SARS-CoV-2, we can hone our (re)search strategies to prepare for the next one. To do just that, a new study has
New technology developed by Japanese engineers has walloped the heck out of the previous data transmission speed record. Along an optical cable more than 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) long, the team achieved a data transmission speed of 319 terabits per second (Tb/s). This not only smashes the previous record of an already jaw-dropping 178 Tb/s,
A group of scientists may have just pinpointed the location on Mars of a mysterious source of methane, a gas most often produced by microbes – and NASA’s Curiosity rover could be right on top of it. Methane blips have pinged on Curiosity’s detection systems six times since the rover landed in Mars’ Gale crater in 2012,
Shipworms are voracious munchers of wood. For thousands of years, these ‘termites of the sea’ have been sinking ships and collapsing wharves with their insatiable appetites. Today, we still don’t know how they devour so much woody plant material as fast as they do. “It’s unbelievable,” says microbiologist Reuben Shipway from the University of Portsmouth
Dogs are born with an innate ability to read human gestures that is not apparent in their closest relative, wolves. Even when wolf puppies are carefully raised by humans and hand-fed for weeks, researchers say the animals act skittish around strangers, make little eye contact, and don’t respond to basic gestures. In a round of
Quantum mechanics deals with the behavior of the Universe at the super-small scale: atoms and subatomic particles that operate in ways that classical physics can’t explain. In order to explore this tension between the quantum and the classical, scientists are attempting to get larger and larger objects to behave in a quantum-like way. In the
A slippery yellow slime that lives in the damp undergrowth is continuing to test our understanding of what it means to make decisions. Physarum polycephalum, AKA the many-headed slime mold, uses its body to physically sense its environment before making a decision about where it wants to go, new research has found. It’s the latest
Last week, wildlife officials in Utah yeeted thousands of fish out of a plane and into 200 high-elevation lakes across the state. The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources (DWR) has been dumping fish out of airplanes since 1956, Live Science previously reported. In a video that went viral this week, fish can be seen bursting
Climate change and deforestation have flipped a large swathe of the Amazon basin from absorbing to emitting planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO2), a transformation that could turn humanity’s greatest natural ally in the fight against global warming into a foe, researchers reported on Wednesday. Hundreds of high-altitude air samples collected over the last decade showed that
After a month of head-scratching, NASA engineers finally think they’ve identified the glitch that took out the world’s most powerful space telescope more than a month ago. The Hubble Space Telescope, which launched into orbit in 1990, has captured images of the births and deaths of stars, discovered new moons around Pluto, and tracked two interstellar objects as they
The hugely successful Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2) video game puts you in a vast, open-world American West setting at the very end of the 19th century. Players can loot trains, shoot rival gang members, steal horses – and, it turns out, learn a lot about nature, too. Researchers surveyed 586 volunteers from 55 different
Newly discovered microfossils some 3.42 billion years old are the oldest evidence yet of a particular type of methane-cycling microbe life – and they could help us understand how life gets started in the first place, both on Earth and further out into the Universe. These life forms would have originally existed just below the
A world just over 300 light-years away has yielded the first ever detection of isotopes in an exoplanet’s atmosphere. In the haze around a gaseous exoplanet named TYC 8998-760-1 b, astronomers detected a form of carbon known as carbon-13. This discovery suggests that the exoplanet formed far from its parent star, in the cold reaches
In what’s probably the most dramatic mass extinction in Earth’s history, an asteroid collided with our planet 66 million years ago, extinguishing 75 percent of living species – including all non-avian dinosaurs. Over the last few years, scientists have discovered many more traces of this cataclysmic impact, providing us with ever greater details of its extreme
A new way of classifying magnetized plasma has led to the discovery of 10 previously unknown topological phases of plasma. Learning more about these phases, and specifically the transitions between them, could help plasma physicists chase down the white whale of energy – plasma fusion. That’s because the transitions between them support edge modes, or
This rarely seen glass octopus bared all recently – even a view of its innards – when an underwater robot filmed it gracefully soaring through the deep waters of the Central Pacific Ocean. Marine biologists spotted the elusive glass octopus (Vitreledonella richardi) during a 34-day expedition off the remote Phoenix Islands, an archipelago located more than 3,200
A new set of equations can precisely describe the reflections of the Universe that appear in the warped light around a black hole. The proximity of each reflection is dependent on the angle of observation with respect to the black hole, and the rate of the black hole’s spin, according to a mathematical solution worked
We’ve got another quantum computing milestone to report, with researchers in China unveiling a super-advanced 66-qubit quantum supercomputer called Zuchongzhi, which by one important metric is the most powerful machine of its kind we’ve seen to date. The performance of Zuchongzhi is undoubtedly impressive: it finished a designated quantum benchmark task in around 70 minutes, and
Although we might think of ourselves as far removed from blobby green algae, we’re not really that different. An algae explosion a few hundred million years ago is thought to have been what allowed all human and animal life to evolve, and all told there’s only about one and a half billion years between us in
Tens of million years ago, sand tiger sharks hunted in the waters off the Antarctic Peninsula, gliding over a thriving marine ecosystem on the seafloor below. All that remains of them today is their sharp pointed teeth, but those teeth tell a story. They’re helping solve the mystery of why the Earth, some 50 million
As the world gets hotter with climate change, one of the ongoing challenges humans will face is simply surviving worsening heat, with projected temperature increases expected to bring increasingly deadly heatwaves, even rendering some parts of the world uninhabitable. Against such harsh heat, a new material developed by scientists in China could have the potential