Last year, astronomers discovered a massive supercluster of galaxies located approximately 4 billion light-years from Earth – and not only is it one of the largest known structures in the cosmos, it’s also the most distant supercluster we’ve ever observed. See, in space, everything is a question of perspective. From where you sit, the planet
Global warming isn’t the cause of slowdown in a huge circulation pattern in the Atlantic Ocean, which is, in fact, part of regular, decades-long cycle that will affect temperatures in coming decades, according to a new study. Oceanographers are concerned about the long-term stability of the Atlantic Ocean circulation, and previous studies show that it
When you add a smiley face to the end of a message, you may be saying more than you realise. Emoticons, faces formed from punctuation symbols such as :-), and emojis, picture symbols such as 😀, are now common features of the way we communicate using phone and internet messaging services and social media. They
One snowy January day, I asked a classroom of college students to tell me the first word that came to mind when they thought about mathematics. The top two words were “calculation” and “equation.” When I asked a room of professional mathematicians the same question, neither of those words were mentioned; instead, they offered phrases
The soaring temperatures in Europe and North America have seen a rise in reports of dogs being rescued from hot cars. Police across England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Ireland, and Canada have all saved dogs from certain death. But in the US, a Great Dane in Juneau, Alaska, a Pitbull Boxer mix in Trussvile, Alabama,
You probably know that, for the most part, Yellowstone National Park is located in Wyoming. But there’s a small sliver of the park that crosses the border into Idaho, and that tiny, 130-square-km (50-square-mile) patch is known as the Zone of Death. Why? Well, thanks to a loophole in the US Constitution, you could technically get
It’s hard to say exactly why you like someone. Maybe it’s their goofy smile; maybe it’s their razor-sharp wit; or maybe it’s simply that they’re easy to be around. You just like them. But scientists generally aren’t satisfied with answers like that, and they’ve spent years trying to pinpoint the exact factors that draw one
What has six legs, two antennae, four furry appendages sprouting from its backside – and a big chunk of the Internet freaked out? The world’s most viral and terrifying moth. A man in Indonesia posted a picture and video of the insect on Facebook in October last year, drawing more than 36,000 comments, many from
After days of intense and viral speculation, archaeologists in Egypt this week finally opened up that mysterious, 2,000-year-old giant black sarcophagus. So far, no curse has been unleashed (that we know of), but the team did discover something slightly gruesome inside – three skeletons, most likely soldiers, decaying in a pool of dark red, murky
Warning: This story contains graphic — if not disgusting, yet fascinating — videos and physical descriptions of the act of popping pimples. Believe it or not, there’s an entire subculture of people really passionate about popping pimples. Sandra Lee, a dermatologist in Southern California, calls them “popaholics” and their sickening — yet, somewhat intriguing — obsession with watching
Thanks to high school, we’ve all got a pretty good idea about what’s on the periodic table. But whether you’re looking at something common like calcium, iron, and carbon, or something more obscure like krypton and antimony, how well do you know their functions? Could you name just one practical application for vanadium or ruthenium?
Mapping the human brain in detail could help to unlock some of its mysteries, but our own brains are such amazingly intricate organs that we’re going to be waiting a while for that to happen. Still, scientists just took an important step towards that goal. A team has just created a high-definition, 3D picture of something
Ah, nature. So majestic. So serene. So … disturbing. It turns out that there’s a lot of grotesquery in the animal kingdom, and it goes far beyond snacking on the occasional dead young. Many more animals than you would think have been spotted trying to get their rocks off with the dead. In some cases,
You’ve seen it, you’ve heard it, but have you ever smelled it? As bizarre as it sounds, lightning has a distinct odor. But unlike its blinding flash or deafening roar, the scent of a lightning bolt is much more subtle. In fact, you’ve probably experienced it before. Whenever lightning strikes, it heats the air to
In just a few weeks, NASA is due to launch one of its most ambitious projects yet. The Parker Solar Probe is going to swoop in and ‘touch’ the Sun – coming in closer to the solar surface than any probe has ever done before. Parker’s three closest orbits will bring it within 6.1 million
It may soon be possible for parents to edit the genes of their children before they’re born, changing their DNA in ways that could affect their health and enhance their senses, strength, or even intelligence. The situation is so close to becoming reality, in fact, that genetic experts have pushed in recent years for more
Electron microscopes have been capable of taking snapshots of individual atoms for nearly half a century. But we’ve never seen anything quite on this scale. A new method for catching and measuring the spray of electron beams is giving us a whole new resolution of the sub-ångström world, opening the way to studying molecular structures
Back in 2008, researchers found a weird set of dinosaur fossils in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah. Most ankylosaurid dinosaurs found in the area have smooth bony armour on their skull. This one was spiky. After 10 years of hard work the research has just been published, confirming this weird spike-armoured oddity
All those liquids made out of soy, almond, rice, coconut or oats won’t be called milk anymore, if the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has its way. According to the government body’s definition, the word “milk” only refers to lactate from an animal, preferably a cow. And whatever was squeezed out of that soybean
Tens of thousands of years before Swiss inventor Karl Elsener attached a corkscrew to a pocketknife, Neanderthals had their own multipurpose tools: hand axes. These four- or five-inch (10 -13 centimetre) stones were cut into large teardrop shapes, with wide bases that tapered to twin cutting edges. Neanderthals used hand axes to chop and carve
Egyptian archaeologists on Thursday pried open a mysterious 30-ton black sarcophagus and found three skeletons, including one that had suffered a blow to the skull. Legends abounded about the sarcophagus, which construction workers found earlier this month more than 16 feet (5 metres) below ground in a residential area of Alexandria. Some observers thought it
They mystery of why a young star dims every so often may have just been solved. For the first time, researchers have observed what they think may be a star hoovering up the debris after a nearby collision between two planets. It’s not Tabby’s Star, sorry everyone. But it’s actually been puzzling astronomers for much
Using longer exposures and sophisticated processing techniques, scientists have taken extraordinarily high-fidelity pictures of the Sun’s outer atmosphere – what we call the corona – and discovered fine details that have never been detected before. The Sun is a complex object, and with the soon-to-be-launched Parker Solar Probe we’re on the verge of learning so
Rhinos in Australia might seem like an insane proposition – after all, we’ve had historically bad luck with introduced species. But on reflection it’s not quite as crazy as it sounds. There are five species of rhinoceros in the world: two in Africa and three in Asia. The world of all five species is being
After years of debate, the current geological epoch has finally been cut into three sections. While some geologists clearly think it’s a justified change, others feel the move was premature and deserved further discussion. The International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) recently ratified the division of the Holocene into the Meghalayan, Northgrippian, and Greenlandian ages
This brand-new baby snake wouldn’t have been on this world long when it died in the Cretaceous period. But in an interesting twist of fate, it was encased in resin and found by humans 99 million years later in Myanmar. The snake fossil is tiny – missing a head and with about 97 bones all
Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to save lives by predicting natural disasters, stopping human trafficking, and diagnosing deadly diseases. Unfortunately, it also has the potential to take lives. Efforts to design lethal autonomous weapons – weapons that use AI to decide on their own whether or not to attempt to kill a person –
Rangers have temporarily closed off parts of Grand Teton National Park after guides noticed growing fissures in the area just over a week ago. Since Grand Teton is connected to Yellowstone, and Yellowstone is well known for sitting on top of what could well be a giant volcanic time bomb, the news has rung some
A four-year survey of the entire sky has just delivered results, and they are awesome: we have confirmation that the standard cosmological model, which describes the age, rate of expansion, history and contents of the Universe, is indeed accurate. For four years, the European Southern Observatory’s Planck satellite sailed the skies, constantly scanning and collecting
“A red sky at night is a shepherd’s delight! A red sky in the morning is a shepherd’s warning.” Perhaps this saying came to mind if you caught a spectacular sunrise or sunset recently. Since biblical times and probably before, proverbs and folklore such as this developed as a way for societies to understand and
In one of the largest studies of its kind, scientists have made a fascinating discovery. Nearly 40 percent of people have a first memory that is entirely fictional. It’s not that their memories are muddled and out of sequence – but that they never happened at all. Researchers surveyed 6,641 people about the earliest memories
A brush fire turned into a “firenado” along the Colorado River on Saturday as shocked bystanders filmed the horrifying blaze. An Arizona couple was driving near the state border of Blythe, California on Saturday when they came across the flames. What started out as a brush fire turned into a “firenado,” or a fire tornado,
We have some bad news. Those amazing white sandy beaches in Hawaii and similar places are not just finely milled pieces of rock. Instead, that beautiful sand is at least partially made up of fish poop. Lots and lots of fish poop. The species responsible are parrotfish - large and colourful tropical fish that live in coral
Huge swaths of Earth are in for a special astronomical treat in late July: the longest total lunar eclipse in roughly 100 years. During the early morning of July 28, Earth will pass between the sun and the moon to cast a shadow on our 4.5-billion-year-old satellite. Earth’s shadow isn’t a dull grey, though. It
The 10:23 am emergency call to the 23000 block of Buckland Lane was dispatched as a reported bee sting. Responding firefighters quickly discovered how big of an understatement that was. When their truck pulled up to the home in Lake Forest, California, they saw a cleaning lady being attacked by a swarm of some 80,000
Until recently, if you asked most experts when the first human beings arrived and settled in North America, you’d get an answer along the lines of 13,500 years ago. But over the last few years, evidence has been mounting that humans arrived at the continent earlier. And now a massive discovery of hundreds of thousands
We only have fifteen years. That’s how long experts say it will be before thousands of miles of American internet cables will be submerged by rising seas. A new analysis has overlaid sea level incursion projections on top of maps of critical internet infrastructure in the US, to discover that ‘locked in’ climate change by
I like the catchy term that scientists recently came up with to describe a common psychological phenomenon: the “invisibility cloak illusion”. I don’t quite like what it describes. According to the scientists, and their 2016 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we incorrectly assume that other people aren’t paying nearly as much
It materialised out of almost nowhere. Thousands of years after disappearing from human sight and knowledge, an ancient ‘henge’ site has been discovered hidden within the archaeological landscape of Ireland’s Brú na Bóinne. To reveal this long-forgotten structure, it took a chance intersection between an aerial drone flight and a brutal hot streak that’s been
Astronomers looking for stuff in the outer Solar System have received a huge and unexpected surprise – the accidental discovery of 12 previously unknown moons in orbit around Jupiter. This brings the total of known Jovian moons to 79. The newly discovered satellites increase Jupiter’s lead in the Solar System as the planet with the
Hawaii’s continuously erupting Kīlauea has been pretty busy this week, creating short-lived islands and hurling lava bombs at unsuspecting tourists over the last few days. On Monday morning, a lava bomb (a flying chunk of molten rock) hit a tour boat, injuring 23 people, and damaging the boat roof and railing. According to officials, 13
That diamond on your wedding ring isn’t as rare as you might think. Using sound waves, scientists uncovered a cache of diamonds distributed deep below the Earth’s surface, and it amounts to over a quadrillion tonnes of the precious mineral. (Yes, you read that right.) That’s according to a new study published by a team
Historians and archaeologists have traditionally linked bread to the dawn of agriculture, when people domesticated plants such as wheat, cultivated them and ground them into flour. But a new discovery of blackened crumbs at an ancient stone building in the Middle East indicates that people were baking bread thousands of years earlier. Based on the
Large algae seaweeds known as kelp have been able to float some 20,000 kilometres (12,427 miles) from the southernmost reaches of the Indian and Atlantic oceans all the way to the shores of Antarctica – a trip previously thought to be impossible. Not only is it an incredible journey, it’s the first hard proof that
An entire previously unknown burial complex has been uncovered in the Egyptian desert necropolis of Saqqara. The finds centre on a mummification workshop, where priests prepared the bodies of the deceased for burial – a burial shaft in its middle tunnelled up to 30 metres (98 feet) underground. Down this shaft, archaeologists found a number
Australia is responsible for over 13 thousand tonnes of plastic litter per year. At the end of June 2018, the Australian government released an inquiry report on the waste and recycling industry in Australia. One of the recommendations was that we should phase out petroleum-based single-use plastics by 2023. This means a real social shift,
Nuclear weapons are humankind’s most fearsome creations. In a matter of minutes, one nuclear-armed nation can level dozens of cities, spread radioactive fallout for hundreds or thousands of miles, and wreck Earth’s climate. Most people are familiar with the basics: Slap together enough uranium or plutonium and – kaboom! – you have a nuclear blast.
Narcissists aren’t hard to spot. You can tell them from the way they act, how they’re raised, or where they live. Even, apparently, their eyebrows. But where does this grandiose sense of self-importance and entitlement actually come from? A new study from psychologists in Germany suggests the answers might not be as simple as what
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