Plastic pollution has reached the Antarctic wilderness. It’s at Earth’s highest peak, and its deepest chasm. And yet, the extent of this insidious plague can still take us by surprise. According to new research, plastic has now turned up camouflaged as ordinary pebbles. These small chunks of plastic – called pyroplastics – are created when
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Between its raging heat and intense gravity, the region really close to the Sun is a pretty hazardous place. And that has been spectacularly demonstrated in a new video of a comet, like the legendary Icarus, falling to its doom when it veered a little too close. The comet’s death dive was captured by the
Early Earth grew up in a chaotic time. As our planet tried to find its place in a relatively young Solar System about 4.5 billion years ago, it was under constant attack from waves of comets, whizzing asteroids, and even some failed proto-planets. The Late Heavy Bombardment period was the absolute zenith of all this
Our galaxy could be littered with warm, watery planets like Earth. That’s the conclusion of researchers at Penn State University, who used data from NASA’s Kepler telescope to estimate the number of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way. Their results, published in The Astronomical Journal this week, suggest that an Earth-like planet orbits one in
The eerie, hellish glow coming from the Moon may seem unreal in this image, since it’s invisible to our eyes. But instruments that detect gamma rays tell us it’s real. More than just a grainy, red picture, it’s a vivid reminder that there’s more going on than meets human eyes. It’s also a reminder that
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, still wants to drop nuclear bombs on Mars to transform it into a livable planet for humans — as evidenced by his latest tweet on Friday morning. Nuke Mars! — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 16, 2019 Musk believes that by hitting Mars with nuclear weapons, the planet’s polar
People around the world may be worried about nuclear tensions rising, but I think they’re missing the fact that a major cyberattack could be just as damaging – and hackers are already laying the groundwork. With the US and Russia pulling out of a key nuclear weapons pact – and beginning to develop new nuclear
The self-declared daredevil and Flat Earther “Mad” Mike Hughes is preparing for another launch in his homemade, steam-powered rocket in the Californian desert. His final goal is to reach the edge of space, but how likely is he to succeed and see that the Earth is actually spherical? Hughes’ first rocket launch was in 2014,
For quantum computing to become fully realised, we’re going to have to make a few huge scientific leaps along the way – including finding a superconductor that can act in the same way as silicon does in today’s computing. A team of researchers thinks that search might now be over. Introducing the compound uranium ditelluride
It looks like we’ve bagged another win for gravitational wave astronomy. A new gravitational wave detection is the best candidate yet for a type of cosmic collision never seen – the elusive merger between a black hole and a neutron star. The event, called S190814bv, was detected by the LIGO and Virgo interferometers at 11
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosetta mission spent two years at the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. At the end of September 2016, its mission was ended when the spacecraft was sent on a collision course into the comet. During its time at comet 67P, it captured a vast amount of images. The ESA made all those images freely available at
In its new special report on climate change and land, the IPCC calls for more effective and sustainable land management, and more sustainable food consumption. But who is the onus on to go vegetarian, or look after land better? You, me, the “global elite”? The world’s poorest people, or perhaps the many millions of newly-wealthy
Carbon can be arranged in a number of configurations. When each of its atoms is bonded to three other carbon atoms, it’s relatively soft graphite. Add just one more bond and it becomes one of the hardest minerals known, diamond. Chuck 60 carbon atoms together in a soccerball shape and boom, buckyballs. But a ring
In July, the French daily newspaper Le Monde reported that the 0.6-mile (1 kilometre) solar road was a fiasco. In December 2016, when the trial road was unveiled, the French Ministry of the Environment called it “unprecedented”. French officials said the road, made of photovoltaic panels, would generate electricity to power streetlights in Tourouvre, a
The illustrious Hubble Space Telescope has captured two passing galaxies making contact for the first time. Known as UGC 2369, the featured duo is fated to one day merge and become a single galaxy. But for now, the two galaxies are just getting to know each other. In the image below, the pair can be seen
Data from thousands of surface monitoring stations worldwide, including ocean buoys in the Pacific and land-based thermometers dotting the continents, show that July 2019 was the warmest month on Earth since at least 1850. Berkeley Earth, an independent climate monitoring and research organization, released data Thursday showing last month beat August 2016 for the title
Climate deniers are often featured by the mainstream media as a way to ‘balance’ their reporting, and yet for most of this century, climate coverage has been neither fair nor balanced. Since the early 2000s, scientific dispute over the reality of human-caused climate change has virtually come to an end. But you wouldn’t necessarily know
Greenland is known for its glaciers, but in the past month, the island has shed ice and taken on fire. Scientists didn’t expect to see Greenland melt at this rate for another 50 years: By the last week of July, the melting had reached levels that climate models projected for 2070 in the most pessimistic
Something weird can happen to the ears of people who hang out in the icy cold of the ocean’s embrace. Small spurs of bone start growing in the ear canals, triggered by the irritation the cold temperatures cause on the inner ear. It’s a condition seen a lot in surfers, so it’s known as surfer’s
A careful inspection of super-deep diamonds has revealed what geologists have long suspected: Hiding somewhere in our planet’s interior, there exists a vast reservoir of primordial magma, undisturbed for more than 4 billion years. The location, the size and the contents of this ancient reservoir are still up for debate, but thanks to these diamonds,
While a team of researchers from the US Geological Survey (USGS) was analysing rainwater samples for nitrogen pollution, they found something they weren’t expecting – plastic. In a new report, aptly titled “It is raining plastic”, the team explain that plastics were identified in over 90 percent of the rainwater samples they took at eight different
Ah, New Zealand. The ancient home of enormous parrots. And, apparently, penguins that would tower menacingly over them. Researchers have found the remains of a beast that would have stood nearly as tall as a human, one of the biggest penguins to ever waddle the Earth. Paleontologists have named the penguin Crossvallia waiparensis, and it
Jupiter’s core is a bizarre mix of solid rocks mixed with a diffuse bubble of hydrogen gas. And the story of how it got that way has long eluded explanation. But now scientists think they’re on to something, suggesting that the gas giant absorbed another protoplanet during a head-on collision some 4.5 billion years ago
Around 54 million years ago, in the early Eocene, there lived a tiny crane fly. It may not have been a particularly remarkable crane fly while it was alive, but after it died, geological processes turned it into something magnificent: a fossil so brilliantly preserved, we can make out the individual cells of its compound
Human semen, If you separated it out, would on average hold a 50/50 mix of sex chromosomes – half of the sperm bearing the Y chromosome, and half the X chromosome. Despite all the myths about choosing the sex of your baby through superstitious rituals, there’s not a lot we can do about changing those odds. And
One of the biggest mysteries out there in the Universe is inching closer to answers. An astonishing eight new repeating radio signals known as fast radio bursts (FRBs) have been detected flaring from deep space. At the start of 2019, just one of these mysterious signals, FRB 121102, was known to flash repeatedly. In January,
After reports emerged that contractors had reviewed voice recordings for Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant, all three companies moved to change their policies. Although customers theoretically have the final word over their digital assistants, they’re not given the option of blocking the recordings outright. The companies say the data is collected and reviewed
Facebook has been clandestinely accumulating written transcriptions of its users’ conversations, which the social media giant recorded through their phone microphones. That’s according to third-party contractors who spoke to Bloomberg about the practice. The contractors said that they were paid to listen in on countless, occasional vulgar conversations among Facebook Messenger users, though the company
The human brain is a remarkable thing. It can do things our primate relatives are thousands – maybe even millions – of years of evolution away from, and our most complex machines are not even close to competing with our powers of higher consciousness and ingenuity. And yet, those 80 billion or so neurons are also incredibly fragile. If
When scientists ran DNA analysis on a sediment core taken from the floor of the Arctic ocean back in 2010, they found something surprising. A previously unknown organism belonging to the strange domain of microbes called Archaea appeared to have genomic characteristics associated with a totally different domain – Eukaryota. They named their discovery Lokiarchaeota,
There have been plenty of claims about what being left-handed means, and whether it changes the type of person someone is – but the truth is something of an enigma. Myths about handedness appear year after year, but researchers have yet to uncover all of what it means to be left-handed. So why are people
You may have heard the tired argument that if carbon dioxide levels are going up, it’s going to be great for boosting the growth of trees. It’s true – to an extent. But there’s a really important detail we must not miss. Plants, including trees, are growing faster thanks to what is known as the
A peculiar hiccup in the rotation speed of a dead star has turned out to be even more interesting than we thought. For the first time, astronomers have shown that the rotation of the Vela pulsar slowed down immediately before its 2016 glitch. Not only was this completely unexpected, it could help us narrow down
From a sizzling scorcher in the South to severe storms in the east and Mid-Atlantic, a ring of fire weather pattern will bring summer hazards to more than 40 million Americans for the first part of this week. Heat alerts stretch more than 1,000 miles from San Angelo, Texas, to Jacksonville, Florida, a region where
Gigantic interplanetary shockwaves reverberate across our Solar System, originating from the Sun and the bursts of charged particles or solar winds escaping it. But measuring such a shock in detail takes some very finely tuned instruments – and scientists just managed it for the first time. These shocks are made up of particles transferring energy
The supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, is relatively quiet. It’s not an active nucleus, spewing light and heat into the space around it; most of the time, the black hole’s activity is low key, with minimal fluctuations in its brightness. Most of the time. Recently, astronomers caught it
What lengths would you go to if your survival truly depended upon it? Probably more than you give yourself credit for. Humans are versatile creatures, and throughout our history we’ve appeared in unexpected places, such as one mountainous area in Ethiopia 45,000 years ago. Possibly due to a lack of water in the valleys, these
Scientists studying freshly fallen snow in Antarctica have uncovered a rare isotope of iron in the interstellar dust hidden inside it, suggesting the dust showed up recently. This discovery could give us crucial information about the history of stellar explosions in our galactic neighbourhood. We know that cosmic dust is drifting down to Earth all
The Universe is vast beyond imagination, containing billions upon billions of galaxies. We have a pretty good handle on a lot of galactic dynamics, but how these colossal objects form, grow, and change is still something we’re struggling to understand. Enter the UniverseMachine: simulation software run on a powerful supercomputer, able to grow millions of
Picture two tissue box-sized spacecraft orbiting Earth. Then picture them communicating, and using a water-powered thruster to approach each other. If you can do that, then you’re up to speed on one of the activities of NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology Program (SSTP.) It’s all part of NASA’s effort to develop small spacecraft to serve their
There are few things more special than watching a shooting star streak across the sky on a warm summer evening. Viewers across the United States will have a chance Sunday night into the pre-dawn hours on Monday, as well as Monday night into early Tuesday morning, when a dozen meteors per hour and possibly up
The aptly named goliath frog is the biggest species of frog in the world, and scientists now say it’s the first African amphibian we know of to engage in ‘nest-building’ activity – something that may actually be responsible for their gigantic size. The nests that these frogs build are small, protected ponds for their young
There are more pieces of plastic in the ocean than stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Up to 14 million tons of plastic enters the ocean annually, 40 percent of which is considered “single-use”, which means it goes into the water within the same year that it was produced. Most plastics never fully break down;
Some people don’t like sharing their food – we all have a friend who gets cranky when you steal a chip from their plate. For wild animals, this makes sense, because any food shared is energy lost that could otherwise have been used to pursue more food. So it was a big surprise to discover
Glowing catsharks that lurk the briny depths have a fluorescence mechanism never seen before in another organism. And that glow could be conferring some serious perks – such as the ability to pick out other sharks among the many fluorescent things on the seafloor. “Studying biofluorescence in the ocean is like a constantly evolving mystery
What can be done with the deserted land in Ukraine after Chernobyl’s catastrophic nuclear disaster? Three decades on, researchers have an idea. Introducing “Atomik” vodka: a new spirit produced from crops grown in Chernobyl’s exclusion zone. A team of British scientists worked alongside colleagues in Ukraine to produce the vodka, made with grain and water
A pair of Romanian scientists have built a flying saucer — and it actually flies a lot like the ones you’ve probably seen in the movies. Razvan Sabie and Iosif Taposu unveiled the All-Directional Flying Object (ADIFO) in March, releasing a video that not only showed the saucer in flight, but also broke down the
The 17th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler was one of the first to muse about the structure of snowflakes. Why are they so symmetrical? How does one side know how long the opposite side has grown? Kepler thought it was all down to what we would now call a “morphogenic field” – that things want to have
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