Few moons in the Solar System are as intriguing as Jupiter’s moon Europa. A global ocean of salt water almost certainly surrounds the moon – and it holds more water than any ocean on Earth. Above this immense sea, where surface temperatures dip to minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit (-184 degrees Celsius), a crust of water
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In 1670, a new object lit up the Northern sky. Later known as CK Vulpeculae, or Nova Vulpeculae 1670, it became famed as the earliest example of a well-documented nova. The only problem with that? It’s not a nova after all. Instead, the object was produced by the incredible collision between a brown dwarf and
Leaked documentation reveals new Macs contain a hidden mechanism designed to make them inoperative if they are independently repaired, reports show. According to technical memos obtained by a number of outlets, any Mac with Apple’s new T2 chip conceals a security feature critics describe as a ‘kill switch’, which effectively bricks the devices if they
In August of the year 79 CE, the surrounds of volcano Mount Vesuvius were definitely not the place to be. Over the two days of a catastrophic eruption, if pyroclastic surges didn’t roast you alive, any number of other things could have made for a horrific death. Including, according to new research, this exciting death:
It’s easy to feel hopeless about the future of our world, especially when the latest IPCC report has just come out, warning that we have barely a decade left to prevent the most catastrophic climate change scenario. Meanwhile, Earth’s climate continues to smash record after record, plastic will outweigh fish in the oceans by 2050,
Google kept quiet for more than six months about its discovery of a bug that put at risk the personal data of hundreds of thousands of Google+ users, the company said Monday, a delay that could spark a new round of regulatory and political scrutiny. The decision to not immediately report the software bug –
The Hubble Space Telescope is currently operating in safe mode, with all science operations suspended, after one of the three gyroscopes used to aim the telescope failed on Friday 5 October. NASA was quick to offer reassurance: “Hubble’s instruments still are fully operational and are expected to produce excellent science for years to come,” public
Humanity is on a crash course with the natural world, and for decades, climate scientists have been throwing up stop sign after stop sign. But no matter how many warnings we receive – and let’s be honest, at this point we have had far too many – no one is willing to put their foot
Six years after Voyager 1 officially left the Solar System, it looks like its companion probe, Voyager 2, is getting close to the interstellar boundary as well. According to NASA, the spacecraft has started to detect the same increase in cosmic radiation that hit Voyager 1 just before it finally entered interstellar space. Although Voyager
A new font can help lodge information deeper in your brain, researchers say, but it’s not magic – just the science of effort. Psychology and design researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne created a font called Sans Forgetica, which was designed to boost information retention for readers. It’s based on a theory called “desirable difficulty”,
The sixth largest meteorite recorded in Michigan has just been brought to the attention of experts over 80 years after its discovery. After living a humble life as a 10 kilogram (22 pound) doorstop in a local farm, the space rock is now getting the attention it deserves. “I could tell right away that this
Nobody likes getting dialled by some weirdo who won’t say anything when you pick up. But sometimes, such stories have a blissfully cute ending. That’s what happened to marine mammal vet Claire Simeone, who managed to track down her own prank-calling perpetrator – only to find he was a heck of a lot smaller than
With the modern textile industry at our fingertips, it’s trivial to have socks with all kinds of patterns – including the ever-popular stripes. But even Ancient Egyptians had a love for the stripey sock, and now we finally know how they achieved their vivid dye colours. Scientists from the British Museum have applied a non-invasive
When it comes time to begin conducting regular crewed missions to Mars, and perhaps even establishing a permanent outpost there, astronauts and potential Martian settlers will have to know how to work with the local environment. Remember that scene in The Martian where astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is forced to grow his own food
What images go through your mind when you think of the end of the world? Asteroids? Perhaps a world war? Climate change? Or even aliens? Even if some of these things are realistic, there’s a much greater threat lurking beneath Earth’s surface that could put an end to human civilisation – and very few know
Anonymous British graffiti artist Banksy has pulled off another stunt that seized the attention of the art world — this time at the expense of his own work. On Friday, a Banksy painting titled “Girl with Red Balloon” was being auctioned at Sotheby’s in London. The spray-painted and acrylic piece depicted a little girl extending
I need a caffeine boost in the morning to properly function. And I’m not alone – according to a Reuters study, 65 percent of Americans have coffee every day, and more than 85% drink it regularly. But, according to CNBC, there’s a specific time of day you should drink your coffee if you want to feel the best
Within a decade of a massive die off due to a fungus commonly known as chytrid, the frog species left in El Copé, Panama developed the ability to coexist with the deadly fungus. In a later field study, the researchers found that frogs infected with the fungus survived at a nearly identical rate compared with
The Kepler mission is coming to an end. The planet-hunting spacecraft that transformed our understanding of exoplanets and other solar systems is almost out of fuel. What little fuel remains is being held in reserve to ensure that the last of its data can be sent home. The Kepler team has placed the spacecraft in
A psychologist In the hit BBC TV show, Killing Eve, Villanelle, a psychopathic assassin, tells Eve, a security service operative, “You should never call a psychopath a psychopath. It upsets them.” She then pouts her lip in an imitation of someone feeling upset. Most people think they know what a psychopath is: someone who has
We don’t need to tell you world news is pretty grim right now – if you use social media, it’s nigh on impossible to avoid articles about bubbling permafrost, drug-resistant gonorrhoea, and deadly obesity treatments. And that’s just the science headlines. But despite all the doom and gloom, in reality there are a whole bunch
Doctors in a Canadian intensive care unit stumbled on a very strange case last year – when life support was turned off for four terminal patients, one of them showed persistent brain activity even after they were declared clinically dead. For more than 10 minutes after doctors confirmed death through a range of observations, including
Can the origin of life be explained with quantum mechanics? And if so, are there quantum algorithms that could encode life itself? We’re a little closer to finding out the answers to those big questions thanks to new research carried out with an IBM supercomputer. Encoding behaviours related to self-replication, mutation, interaction between individuals, and
In the last weeks before it plunged into the stormy heart of Saturn a year ago, Cassini did something no other probe has done before. It swooped in between the planet and its signature rings, instrumentation furiously collecting data all way until the absolute end. And in those final orbits, it was bathed in unexpectedly
A comparison of surveys taken of the sky years apart has revealed an empty space where a star 280 million light years away once sat. Coded FIRST J1419+3940, records of the object hint at what would have been a violent death. Curiously, no trace of its final explosive moments can be found – but this
If the world is going to avoid catastrophic climate change, we need to stop consuming fossil fuels and start getting power from renewable energy sources – including geothermal energy, biofuels, hydropower, solar farms, and wind – as soon as possible. Wind is particularly appealing, as it’s one of the cheapest and most efficient ways to
An eight-year-old Swedish-American girl named Saga Vanecek has sealed her fate as a future queen of legend – in July, she pulled a possibly 1,500 year-old pre-Viking era sword from a lake in Sweden. Sweden has been hit by an intense drought this year, which lowered the water levels in the Vidöstern lake where the epic
It’s little secret that Neanderthals and our ancestors intimately enjoyed each other’s company. The legacy of this occasional genetic mixing persists in the form of Neanderthal DNA that many modern humans continue to carry. Exactly how this exchange benefited us has been a bit of a mystery. A new study argues that we have Neanderthals
The Pentagon is studying whether insects can be enlisted to combat crop loss during agricultural emergencies. The bugs would carry genetically engineered viruses that could be deployed rapidly if critical crops such as corn or wheat became vulnerable to a drought, a natural blight or a sudden attack by a biological weapon. The concept envisions
A couple of weeks ago a small hole in Arkansas became a show-stopper, with a 12-foot (3.6 metre) high flame erupting out of it, which continued to burn at 8 feet (2.4 metres) for over 40 minutes. Unfortunately, there are no pictures or video of the September 17 flame-shooting event (it happened at 4:30 am),
China secretly inserted surveillance microchips into servers used by major technology companies, including Apple and Amazon.com, in an audacious military operation likely to further inflame trade tensions between the United States and its leading source of electronics components and products, Bloomberg Businessweek reported Thursday morning. The article – which the companies vigorously denied – detailed
Using the most detailed map of the galaxy produced so far, astronomers have spotted more than a dozen high-speed stars that seem to be zooming in our direction – and they are potentially just a fraction of the total number of stars on similar headings. Interestingly, the study was intended to find high velocity stars
It may only be 2 millimetres in diameter, but that tiny hole in Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft docked on the International Space Station is creating a much bigger drama than depressurisation. After Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin went on TV Monday to say the Russian investigation had determined that the hole was not a “manufacturing defect,” NASA
Matter ejected from a spinning disc of doom surrounding a black hole a mere 15,000 light years away has produced some of the most energetic rays of light ever witnessed from an object of its kind. The insanely powerful photons of gamma radiation were produced by a never-before-seen phenomenon surrounding a miniature quasar. The discovery
An erupting geyser is said to be a breathtaking natural spectacle. But it’s probably a lot less so when it starts raining down decades of garbage. In its biggest blow in over 60 years, Yellowstone National Park’s dormant Ear Spring blew its top, erupting scalding hot water over 9 metres (30 feet) into the air
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a physicist, a philosopher, and a medievalist got together and decided to hoax cultural studies journals with a score of fake research papers. The story is familiar, but this time the joke is far bigger. Their intention was to expose the shoddy standards that count for publishing
Nobel Prize-winning scientist Donna Strickland did not have a Wikipedia page until she became a Nobel laureate, and earlier attempts to write a page for her were rejected because she was not famous enough. Strickland won the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics for breakthroughs in the field of lasers on Tuesday alongside French scientist Gerard
The next time you’re standing at the edge of a scenic cliff or on top of a waterfall, take care before snapping a quick selfie. It could be the last thing you do. More than 250 people worldwide have died while taking selfies in the last six years, according to a new study from researchers
The 2018 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded Wednesday to Frances H. Arnold, George P. Smith and Gregory P. Winter for their work that harnessed evolutionary principles to create new proteins. Arnold, a professor of chemical engineering at California Institute of Technology, won one half of the prize “for the directed evolution of enzymes.” George
We tap away on our mobile devices all day long. Isn’t it about time they tapped us back? Human-computer interaction researcher Marc Teyssier clearly thinks so. He’s the brains behind MobiLimb, a horrifying finger-like robotic attachment for smartphones and tablets that somehow simultaneously evokes The Addams Family and Black Mirror. Today, he published a video
Only days after a devastating earthquake and tsunami struck the Indonesian island of Sulawesi – killing at least 1,347 people – survivors now have another powerful force of nature to reckon with. Months of increased activity at the Mount Soputan volcano on Sulawesi culminated in an eruption this morning, producing an ash column estimated to
Given the abundance of moons in our own Solar System, you’d think there are heaps orbiting exoplanets, too. Such exomoons have been elusive until now – but it looks like that has finally changed. Last year, astronomers Alex Teachey and David Kipping of Columbia University announced they’d spotted the very first exomoon candidate in data
After studying hundreds of recently discovered exploding stars, physicists have concluded it’s unlikely there are sufficient numbers of primordial black holes out there to account for the dark matter phenomenon. This doesn’t mean the category of material referred to as massive compact halo objects (MACHOs) can’t contribute to the unseen 84 percent of the Universe’s
There’s no denying that sloths are weird creatures. They risk their lives every time they poo, their organs are stuck to their bones, and finding a mate looks like a nightmare. Now we can add an extra feature to the sloths’ repertoire: their metabolism is so weird, scientists have never seen it before in the
Stinging trees grow in rainforests throughout Queensland and northern New South Wales in Australia. The most commonly known (and most painful) species is Dendrocnide moroides (Family Urticaceae), first named “gympie bush” by gold miners near the town of Gympie in the 1860s. My first sting was from a different species Dendrocnide photinophylla (the shiny-leaf stinging
Facebook announced on Friday that its engineering team had discovered a security issue affecting almost 50 million accounts. Due to a flaw in Facebook’s code, hackers were able to take over an account and use it in the same way you would if you had logged into the account with a password. The company says
Scientists have mapped out how choice overload works in the brain, showing how our minds can back off from making a decision if the number of options gets too big. This kind of indecision has been noted in previous studies, but this new research identifies the areas of the brain that help us make a
Earth is in a constant state of flux. Over a geologic time scale of millions and billions of years, hot rocks rise up from the planet’s molten core, and colder rocks sink. But this creeping, eternal exchange is broken. Something has disrupted the system – called mantle convection – resulting in a freak geophysical phenomenon
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