Physicists have identified a new state of matter, hidden inside the mysterious transformations that take place between liquid and solid states of glass. The glass transition holds a lot of fascination for scientists, and the new state of matter – called ‘liquid glass’ – exhibits behaviour at the microscopic level that hasn’t been seen before,
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Every winter in the Northern Hemisphere, a cold wind circles the North Pole like water around a drain. It’s an annual weather pattern meteorologists keep an anxious eye on – any significant changes could suggest Europe is in for a serious cold snap. Right now, that wind is ripping in two. Researchers from the Universities of
As if spiders weren’t already crafty enough, on the island of Madagascar, biologists have now found what appear to be frog traps crafted by huntsman spiders (Damastes sp.). The so-called traps were made from leaves stitched together with silk, and potentially offered shady spots for amphibians to rest, resulting in them getting trapped in the
Since time immemorial, philosophers and scholars have contemplated the beginning of time and even tried to determine when all things began. It’s only been in the age of modern astronomy that we’ve come close to answering that question with a fair degree of certainty. According to the most widely-accepted cosmological models, the Universe began with
By now, we have discovered hundreds of stars with multiple planets orbiting them scattered throughout the galaxy. Each one is unique, but a system orbiting the star HD 158259, 88 light-years away, is truly special. The star itself is about the same mass and a little larger than the Sun – a minority in our
Archaeologists claim that they have identified the deadly dance floor where John the Baptist – a preacher who foretold the coming of Jesus - was sentenced to death around CE 29. The Bible and the ancient writer Flavius Josephus (CE 37-100) both describe how King Herod Antipas, a son of King Herod, had John the Baptist executed. Josephus
The smallest known main-sequence star in the Milky Way galaxy is a real pixie of a thing. It’s called EBLM J0555-57Ab, a red dwarf 600 light-years away. With a mean radius of around 59,000 kilometres, it’s just a smidge bigger than Saturn. That makes it the tiniest known star to support hydrogen fusion in its core,
The power to be unseen has long captured our imaginations – from ancient myths to modern fantasies of rings and cloaks that can bestow such a gift. One way to achieve a type of invisibility is to let light pass straight through you – to become transparent. This requires a body composed of tissues that
While we’ve all lived through the same pandemic the past few months, not all of us have responded to the fallout in the same way. A recent small study suggests that there are some distinct differences in the way people with ‘dark’ personality traits have reacted to COVID-19 . These dark personality traits include narcissism,
When falling asleep, it’s not unusual to imagine a calm, provincial scene, like a flock of sheep jumping over a fence. Some people with a rare and poorly understood condition find that task nearly impossible. While they can describe what a sheep is and remember what it looks like, they cannot visualise something in their
The bleak history of whaling pushed many species to the brink of extinction, even in the remote waters of the North and South Poles. Over 1.3 million whales were killed in just 70 years around Antarctica alone. The scale of this industrial harvest completely decimated many populations of large whales in the Southern Ocean. But
Residents of St. Vincent and the Grenadines have been told to remain alert after a Caribbean volcano came back to life. La Soufrière is the highest point in St. Vincent and is located near the northern tip of the country but remained dormant for decades before beginning to spew ash on Tuesday this week, AP reported. Steam,
From daily tooth-brushing to the 11 am coffee, we all have dozens of habits that get us through our daily routine. Some are great – weekly gym visits are often encouraged – others not so much, like smoking a pack a day, or dialling the number of the pizza place way too often. Because we recognise
For a few moments in late April of 2020, oil – normally the lifeblood of the world economy – became more expensive to store than to pay someone to take it away. Crude oil’s wildly fluctuating futures prices reflected the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, with record falls in greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel
The way a person talks or types might reveal little clues about their personality. A meta-analysis of psychological research involving more than 80,000 people has found a small but noticeable link between certain word choices and extraversion, one of the big five personality traits. When talking in person or online, the study found extraverts tend
The best meteor showers are a spectacular sight but, unfortunately, 2021 starts with a whimper. Moonlight this January will wash out the first of the big three — the Quadrantids. After that, the year just gets better and better, with the Perseids (another of the big three along with the Geminids) a particular highlight for
Melting permafrost in the icy north of Siberia is revealing a veritable graveyard of frozen prehistoric animals. In recent decades, locals and scientists in the Russian Republic of Yakutia have uncovered the ancient carcasses of two cave lion cubs, a bison, a horse, a baby woolly rhinoceros, and the most intact woolly mammoth ever found.
Let’s admit it: It’s been a pretty rough year for our neck of the Solar System. But it’s been a great year for scientists studying more distant reaches of the Universe. From a colossal explosion to mystery burps deciphered, here were some of the top stories in physics in 2020. 10. Boom! What might have
You know how stars do. They’re out there, doing their thing, fusing a whole bunch of hydrogen into helium, shining up the joint. But some stars are just a little bit different from the norm. Not content with simply lighting up the night sky like a giant disco, they zoom, shimmer, dim and even hang
Caught between rapidly expanding resource use and climate change-fuelled fires, the future of the Amazon rainforest and the stunning array of life teeming within it just keeps growing bleaker. In a new report for Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development geologist Robert Toovey Walker from University of Florida reviews recent research on the Amazon
By now, we’re all abundantly aware that 2020 has been a tough year. Many of us have been indulging in little acts of self-care just to get through it all – whether it’s a scented candle or a nice face mask. But with all the noise and advertising out there, it can be challenging to
How life originated on Earth continues to fascinate scientists, but it’s not easy peering back billions of years into the past. Now, evidence is growing for a relatively new hypothesis of how life began: with a very precise mix of RNA and DNA. RNA and DNA both determine the genetic make-up of all biological life, with
Wind power accounted for more than half of Great Britain’s daily generated electricity on Saturday in the wake of Storm Bella, according to energy giant Drax. The percentage of wind power in the country’s energy mix hit a record 50.67 percent on Saturday, the company said over the weekend, beating the previous record of 50
Scientists are edging closer to making a super-secure, super-fast quantum internet possible: they’ve now been able to ‘teleport’ high-fidelity quantum information over a total distance of 44 kilometres (27 miles). Both data fidelity and transfer distance are crucial when it comes to building a real, working quantum internet, and making progress in either of these
Are you looking forward to starting or changing something in 2021? Whatever your New Year’s resolutions, there’s an evidence-based way to make them stick for longer – and it’s all in the phrasing. Rather than telling yourself you’ll stop or avoid doing something, tell yourself you’re going to start doing something instead. For example: a
Despite several cliff-scaling efforts to locate another of its kind, so far this native Hawaiian flower appears to be unique. Found on one of the steep forested slopes of Helu that loom over Lahaina in West Maui, Hawaii, Cyanea heluensis was first discovered back in 2010 but it has only just been formally described. Botanist
Just when we thought octopuses couldn’t be any weirder, it turns out that they and their cephalopod brethren evolve differently from nearly every other organism on the planet. In a surprising twist, in April 2017 scientists discovered that octopuses, along with some squid and cuttlefish species, routinely edit their RNA (ribonucleic acid) sequences to adapt
Sometimes, the Universe provides just the perfect method for expressing our feelings. A space cloud 7,500 light-years away has given us the most appropriate farewell we can think of for this whole dumpster fire of a year, 2020. This small clump of material is part of a much larger cloud complex called the Carina Nebula,
Although we humans generally have control of our skeletal musculature, there’s at least one we don’t always have a handle on. In the middle ear sits the tensor tympani, and it seems most people are unable to contract it voluntarily. Those that can contract their tensor tympani – a small muscle located above the auditory
The best present this holiday season came in a small package, parachuted into the Australian desert from far within our Solar System on 5 December 2020. Inside, astronomers were delighted to unwrap the first significant samples of a rocky asteroid which is currently 9 million kilometres (5.6 million miles) away, and returned to Earth in
For a while now, physicists have been hunting for primordial black holes, exotic objects that could have formed in the early Universe and spawned a whole range of cosmic shenanigans. Using a giant 8.2-metre-wide (that’s 27 feet) telescope, physicists from the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics
With just a handful of days left in this strange beast of a year that will most certainly go down in history books, we thought it would be nice to reflect on the marvellous things scientists still delivered, despite everything. Of course, scientific achievements are usually years in the making. Nevertheless, here’s a round-up of
It’s taken nearly five years, 45 research expeditions, and more than 80 scientists and students, but the largest oceanic research enterprise, the ATLAS project, is officially complete. Exploring 12 locations in the deep northern Atlantic, the project has set a gold standard for future marine research. Driving underwater robots to areas never before explored, researchers have uncovered
Space rocks crash to Earth carrying compounds that were formed billions of years ago. Spaceships perform fancy flips in the air but explode when they touch back down too quickly. And sometimes, iguanas fall from trees and land belly-up, frozen on the ground. Here’s a list of seven intriguing objects – and a few reptiles
The way things behave in microgravity may seem obvious to us now, after humans have been venturing into space for over 50 years. But we haven’t always been certain how space might affect certain things. Like fire. Or planarian worms. Or even plants. It’s only by conducting experiments that we can learn the answers to
We’re naturally reluctant to abandon something we’ve sunk time, effort, and money into, even when the best option is to just walk away – and it turns out that monkeys feel exactly the same, according to a new study. This “sunk costs” phenomenon can apply to our relationships, home improvements, books, video games, car repairs,
Almost a millennium ago, a major upheaval occurred in Earth’s atmosphere: a giant cloud of sulphur-rich particles flowed throughout the stratosphere, turning skies dark for months or even years, before ultimately falling down to Earth. We know this event happened because researchers have drilled and analysed ice cores – samples taken from deep within ice
To the disgust of many of our readers, we have discovered that keeping leeches as pets is actually a thing. And yeah, it’s certainly… a bit different. But in light of humanity’s disconnect with nature, and our concerning lack of knowledge about parasitic creatures, the idea that some of us are nurturing these parasites is also, uh, fascinating. “They’re
The world’s (former) largest iceberg continues to break apart into smaller pieces on the doorstep of a major marine wildlife haven and home to millions of macaroni and king penguins in Antarctica. This comes less than a week after the mammoth iceberg, known as A68a, first split in two, Live Science recently reported. Scientists at the US National
Scientists have just set a new world record for high-temperature sustained plasma with the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) device, reaching an ion temperature of above 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit) for a period of 20 seconds. Known as Korea’s “artificial sun”, the KSTAR uses magnetic fields to generate and stabilise
In an exciting development, a new type of whale song may very well belong to a previously unknown population of blue whales, peacefully swimming in the Indian Ocean. The unusual song was picked up at three different underwater locations separated by 3,500 kilometres (2,175 miles) of ocean. First recorded in 2017 off the coast of
A 2,000-year-old fast-food stall unearthed from the ash of Pompeii has given researchers new clues about the snacking habits of the ancient Romans. The ornate snack bar counter, decorated with polychrome patterns and frozen by volcanic ash, was partially exhumed last year but archaeologists extended work on the site to reveal it in its full
A young German pilot said Sunday he traced a giant syringe in the sky as a way of marking the start of Germany’s roll out of vaccines against the coronavirus. Samy Kramer, a 20-year-old amateur pilot, had carefully plotted out the route he needed to take in advance in order to create the effect in
A very rare astronomical phenomenon has been in the headlines a lot recently, and for good reason. It will be hundreds of years until we can see Jupiter and Saturn this close to one another again. However, there are some even more “truly strange and very rare phenomena” that can currently be observed in our night sky. The
In 1950, Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi sat down to lunch with some of his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he had worked five years prior as part of the Manhattan Project. According to various accounts, the conversation turned to aliens and the recent spate of UFOs. Into this, Fermi issued a statement that would go
Most people know the world’s oceans are on the rise, but further inland, the scales of climate change are tipping in the exact opposite direction. As melting glaciers feed fresh water to the oceans, heat and drought are draining our lakes and inland seas of precious liquid. The largest inland body of water on Earth,
Sometimes, science is all about the mind-aching big picture. Like the idea that our Universe is just a giant hologram, or that we’ve actually detected gravitational waves from a neutron star collision. Or that we might not actually have as much free will as we think… Those are really exciting concepts. But then there are other
Imagine opening the weekend paper and looking through the puzzle pages for the Sudoku. You spend your morning working through this logic puzzle, only to realise by the last few squares there’s no consistent way to finish it. “I must have made a mistake,” you think. So you try again, this time starting from the
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