Science is founded on hard evidence, but ironically, many of the stories we tell about scientists and their experiments are not based on much truth. An apple falling on Newton’s head didn’t suddenly stimulate his idea of gravity; Darwin’s theory of evolution wasn’t founded on the beaks of finches. And Benjamin Franklin certainly didn’t discover
Say you’re an alien civilization with advanced technology looking to communicate with other civilizations throughout the Milky Way galaxy. Where would you be setting up your beacon? Probably close to home, right? The galactic center – that crowded, fascinating region around supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* – is one of the best spots in the
The colorful chaos of a wildflower meadow is a much ‘greener’ alternative to a perfectly manicured patch of grass, a team of researchers led by the University of Cambridge says. Cultivating a lawn is a highly popular, centuries-old tradition in much of the Western world. Yet as great as these uniform blankets of green are
The first synthetic substance ever brewed on planet Earth may not have been a product of our own species but was concocted by a close relative as far back as around 200,000 years ago. Researchers from the University of Tübingen and the State Museum of Prehistory in Germany and Strasbourg University in France recently conducted
Background noise – like the chatter in a coffee shop or the drone of passing traffic – might slow our reading speed, but according to a study of Russian readers, it doesn’t affect how our brain comprehends written text. The study looked at the effects of auditory noise and visual distractions such as typos or
A team of archaeologists has found that our obsession with hair removal can be traced back to Roman times. Archaeologists working in Wroxeter Roman City, in Shropshire, England, have discovered a huge collection of over 50 tweezers at the settlement that dates from the 2nd to 4th century CE. They also discovered a skin scraper,
Much like symbolically walking a mile in someone else’s shoes, visual perspective-taking is ‘seeing’ through someone else’s eyes: We follow someone’s gaze to learn what caught their attention, or we may even try and work out what someone else is seeing if our view is blocked. A new study by cognitive zoologists from Lund University
Fruit flies can be truly annoying when they are buzzing around your living room or landing in your wine. But we have much to thank these tiny nuisances for – they revolutionized biological and medical science. Flies and mosquitoes both belong to Diptera, the group of insects that have only two wings (from the Greek
Among the roughly 370,000 known species of flora sprouting on Earth’s surface, a taste for blood is rare. But only one plant is known to be carnivorous on a part-time basis. Triphyophyllum peltatum is a rare plant from the tropical forests of Sierra Leone in West Africa known to trap insects from time to time.
An investigation into the mystery filaments hanging in space around the heart of the Milky Way has turned up an entirely new population of them, aligned along the galactic plane and pointing in the direction of the galactic center. The magnetized strands are likely the remnants of an outflow from the supermassive black hole Sagittarius
According to a famous theory by Stephen Hawking, black holes evaporate over time, gradually losing mass in the form of a strange kind of radiation as the event horizon plays havoc with surrounding quantum fields. But it turns out that the dramatic cliff of an event horizon may not be as critical to this process
Have you ever wondered why your dog is eating your beautifully cropped lawn or nibbling at the grass at the dog park? Eating grass is a common behavior in pet dogs. Some surveys show up to 80 percent of guardians notice their dog regularly snacking on the grass. Grass-eating isn’t a new behavior either, or
The world’s first and only albino panda finally lumbered past a motion-sensitive field camera in the mountains of China earlier this year – the first time it’s been spotted since 2019. Thankfully, the unique creature seems to be growing up happy and healthy in the Wolong National Nature Reserve, a protected region in the Sichuan
The sex of human and other mammal babies is decided by a male-determining gene on the Y chromosome. But the human Y chromosome is degenerating and may disappear in a few million years, leading to our extinction unless we evolve a new sex gene. The good news is two branches of rodents have already lost
In spite of advances in making laboratory-cultured meat products taste like the real deal, we’re yet to see a single factory pumping chicken nuggets out of a vat. That might not be such a bad thing, according to a recent study by researchers from the University of California, Davis (UCD), and the University of California,
Humanity’s consumption comes at a cost to a wide variety of planetary systems that depend on one another for sustainability. Like dominoes, instability in one leans heavily on others in line, creating a set of boundaries that can cause serious problems if breached. Past studies have warned our appetites have stressed at least a few
Since the Cassini spacecraft discovered plumes of water vapor erupting from geysers on Enceladus nearly 20 years ago, Saturn’s ice-covered ocean moon has been a hot topic. The James Webb Space Telescope has now caught sight of the largest plume yet. The telescope’s astonishingly sensitive eye measured an eruption of water vapor punching at least
Ions inside a compact fusion reactor barely a meter (less than 3 feet) across have been heated to the magic figure of 100 million degrees Celsius (some 180 million degrees Fahrenheit) for the first time in a monumental step towards making nuclear fusion energy a practical reality. Researchers from Tokamak Energy Ltd in the UK,
Compared to apes, human children are more likely to open a mystery ‘box’ over one with known contents, a new study finds. This suggests that one thing that makes us unique as a species might be our innate sense of curiosity. Children “explored the uncertain options before the alternatives were presented, showing a higher degree
Atoms may not have bones, but we still want to know how they are put together. These tiny particles are the basis on which all normal matter is built (including our bones), and understanding them helps us understand the larger Universe. We currently use high-energy X-ray light to help us understand atoms and molecules and
Since its founding in 2016, Elon Musk‘s neurotechnology company Neuralink has had the ambitious mission to build a next-generation brain implant with at least 100 times more brain connections than devices currently approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The company has now reached a significant milestone, having received FDA approval to begin
The potent cocktail of toxins in the venom of one of the world’s deadliest spiders seems to vary depending on context. A new analysis of how funnel-web spiders produce their venom shows that factors such as the spider’s heart rate and defensiveness could play a role in the proportions of chemicals delivered on the ends
In addition to everything else that winemakers have to consider in the production of a perfect bottle is the smell of the drink: In certain types of winemaking processes, that smell can end up being rather undesirable. Aromas that you might describe as “rotten eggs”, “rubber” and “canned corn” are often termed as ‘reductive’ and
Today, 80 percent of Australia is arid, but it was not always that way. In the early Pliocene, 5.4 to 3.6 million years ago, Australia had a greenhouse climate, widespread forests and diverse marsupial animals. As the climate dried out in the late Pliocene, open woodland, grassland and shrubland spread across Australia. How did large
Physicists have long puzzled over why there is more matter in the Universe than its flipped twin, antimatter. Without this imbalance, the two types of material would have canceled out, leaving nothing but a boring glow in the vast emptiness of space. Somehow, at some point, something changed in the way the Universe works on
For most of us, this would be a nightmare. Imagine being curled up inside a 90 centimeter (36 inch) fabric sphere with a small window and a small air tank while dangling from the Canadarm. As your tiny sphere shifts, you’d see Earth out your tiny window, then the Space Shuttle, damaged by some accident
The DNA of a strain of bacteria responsible for the infamous Black Death plague has been found in the teeth of three individuals found buried in the UK thousands of years before the deadly pandemics raged across Europe. Two of those individuals, determined to be young adolescents, were buried in a mass grave in Charterhouse
It doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to see why M64 is better known as the Evil Eye galaxy. Sitting in the abyssal vacuum of space it seems to cast a sinister glare across the cosmos, a cloud of dust framing its visible periphery like a dark bruise. The galaxy is even stranger than
Archaeologists have mapped a hidden landscape where Australia’s first people made inroads more than 60,000 years ago. This now-inland region was once a coastal mangrove swamp and, before that, a semi-arid savannah plain hundreds of kilometers from the seashore. During the late Pleistocene epoch, sea levels were so low that Australia was connected to its
Parrots can get a lot out of video calls with their feathered friends just like we can from Zoom meetings with our favorite humans. Findings from a recent study by researchers from Northeastern University and MIT Media Lab in the US and the University of Glasgow in the UK could point to ways to better
A harness-wearing Beluga whale that turned up in Norway in 2019, sparking speculation it was a spy trained by the Russian navy, has appeared off Sweden’s coast, an organization following him said Monday. First discovered in Norway’s far northern region of Finnmark, the whale spent more than three years slowly moving down the top half
Glaciers in the Arctic are not nearly as devoid of life as they might appear at first sight. In fact, carpets of ice and snow in Greenland and Iceland are practically crawling with microscopic life forms. Like seasonal zombies, many of these organisms lie dormant in winter, waking from their frozen slumber only with the
A refined hunt for the extremely rare transformation of the Higgs boson has delivered results, providing the first evidence of a process that could hint at unknown particles. Reconciling the results of several years’ worth of proton crashes inside two different detectors at the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s (CERN) Large Hadron Collider (LHC), physicists
Scientists observed unusual behavior in an octopus that they said looked similar to it waking up from a nightmare. The cephalopod, named Costello, was filmed 24 hours a day in a laboratory at The Rockefeller University in New York over the course of a month. On four occasions, the animal awoke “abruptly” before engaging “in
A new study challenges the idea that marsupials are more ‘primitive’ than mammals by showing their development has changed more than mammals since they last shared an ancestor. “For a long time, people have treated marsupials as ‘lesser mammals,’ which represent the intermediate stage between placental mammals and egg-layers,” explains evolutionary biologist Anjali Goswami from
There’s a harsh, brutal reality to the poultry industry, which in 2021 alone supplied about 286 eggs per person in a growing US population: Billions of male chicks are routinely culled by being crushed alive or gassed at hen hatcheries worldwide. Chick culling arises from the fact that chicks from egg-laying hens are not typically
Astronomers studying black holes have serendipitously found another rarity: A dead star rocketing away from its birth supernova, leaving a comet-like trail of radio emission in its wake. Named PSR J1914+1054g, the star is just the fourth known of its kind: a radio pulsar kicked at high velocity across space, for which astronomers have observed
Can a computer learn from the past and anticipate what will happen next, like a human? You might not be surprised to hear that some cutting-edge AI models could achieve this feat, but what about a computer that looks a little different – more like a tank of water? We have built a small proof-of-concept
Tigers may not change their stripes, but Jupiter sure does. The giant planet’s surprisingly neat, alternating bands of dark and light clouds periodically change their appearance, but the reason for these cyclic variations is a mystery. Now, after studying data on Jupiter’s magnetic field collected by the Juno probe, a team of scientists from Japan,
Engineers have demonstrated something marvelous. Almost any material can be used to create a device that continuously harvests energy from humid air. It’s not a development that’s ready for practical application, but it does, its creators say, transcend some of the limitations of other harvesters. All the material needs is to be pocked with nanopores
Ask anyone living in a coastal area of the UK and they’ll confirm that seagulls can be a nuisance. These birds’ pilfering of food knows no bounds, and no one is safe from one of their thieving attacks. For many people, this behavior is the result of the gulls’ inherent aggression. But in reality, gulls
A reconstruction of oral microflora genomes spanning a whopping 100,000-year period of human history may have revealed a surprising shift in the kinds of bacteria that like to call our mouths home. Researchers from across Germany and the US teamed up to decode DNA extracted from the dental plaque of human and Neanderthal remains, using
Uranus takes 84 years to orbit the Sun, and so that last time that planet’s north polar region was pointed at Earth, radio telescope technology was in its infancy. But now, scientists have been using radio telescopes like the Very Large Array (VLA) the past few years as Uranus has slowly revealed more and more
The pressure to publish or perish has led some desperate researchers to pay for fake papers to pad their resumés. Worse still, some of these sham papers are getting published in official scientific journals. A computer program designed to detect these made-up studies suggests far too many are slipping past peer review. The study was
Fungi pose a significant threat to crops worldwide, scientists warn in a new commentary, with increasingly “devastating” effects on our food supply. We tend to worry more about pathogens that sicken humans directly, especially viruses and bacteria. But while corn smut and stem rust might not scare us like Ebola or E. coli, maybe they
Astronomers have found a planet a mere 87 light years away that is almost exactly the same size as Earth, orbiting its star at a distance that is neither roasting nor frozen. Sounds perfect for Earth 2.0, right? Not so fast. The exoplanet known as LP 791-18d has been tugged so far out of an
Cats have a reputation for aloofness (and flooffiness), but if you and your feline friend aren’t bonding, maybe you’re just not speaking their language. Never fear – research from 2020 has shown that it’s not so difficult. You just need to smile at them more. Not the human way, by baring your teeth, but the
Diplomats from 175 countries gathering in Paris for plastics treaty talks on Monday may want to pack an umbrella, but not just because there’s a chance of rain. France’s capital will also be showered during the five-day talks by billions of microplastic particles falling from the sky, according to the first-ever plastics pollution weather forecast.
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