A mysterious ancient graveyard that has flummoxed Finnish archaeologists for decades could be one of the largest Stone Age cemeteries in northern Europe, a new study suggests. Located on the edge of the Arctic Circle in Tainiaro, a place of long and bitter winters, the site was first unearthed in 1959 and studied again in
When we gaze out into the cosmos beyond the borders of the Milky Way, we behold multitudes. Space is teeming with galaxies, speckled across the darkness like stars. If we stopped there, it would be easy to assume that the distribution of galaxies is more or less even throughout space-time. But there’s some method to
According to the president of COP28, the latest round of UN climate negotiations in the United Arab Emirates, there is “no science” indicating that phasing out fossil fuels is necessary to restrict global heating to 1.5°C. President Sultan Al Jaber is wrong. There is a wealth of scientific evidence demonstrating that a fossil fuel phase-out
In 1986, a gigantic iceberg separated from the Fichner-Ronne ice shelf in West Antarctica. It was so big that it became grounded, stuck to the seafloor, and remained in position for 40 years. Finally, it has now been pushed off the seafloor and has begun drifting in the Weddell Sea to a region in the
A space telescope scanning the skies for gamma rays has added hundreds of new powerful dead stars to its catalog. The addition of 294 previously unidentified stars means that the Fermi catalog of gamma-ray pulsars now contains more than 340 objects – a significant step up since the Fermi Large Area Telescope started observing in
Researchers have been taking a closer look at some bird-like footprint fossils in Africa, stretching back some 210 million years. These footprints are something of a mystery: fossils for even the earliest bird ancestors don’t show up for another 60 million years. These footprints have been known about for many years, but here a team
In October, a great white shark washed up on a beach in southern Australia with its insides conspicuously missing. Large chunks of flesh had been violently ripped from its trunk, but the head, tail, and fins appeared untouched. Scientists can now confirm what they suspected at the time: that orcas were behind the slaughter of
The world’s biggest experimental nuclear fusion reactor in operation was inaugurated in Japan on Friday, a technology in its infancy but billed by some as the answer to humanity’s future energy needs. Fusion differs from fission, the technique currently used in nuclear power plants, by fusing two atomic nuclei instead of splitting one. The goal
A new venture-backed startup is capitalizing on the productivity that can be channeled while lucid dreaming, Fortune reports. Lucid dreaming is a state of being aware that you are dreaming during your sleep cycle and the ability to control or manipulate the dream narrative. As many as 70% of people experience the phenomenon at least
Vampire bats have a history of expanding their range as climates change, researchers report in a new study, supporting concerns about further northward expansion due to human-induced global warming. The findings suggest warming climates in southern regions of the US may soon lure vampire bats to move in, some potentially carrying diseases like rabies that
File this under ‘That’s not supposed to happen!’: Scientists observed a metal healing itself, something never seen before. If this process can be fully understood and controlled, we could be at the start of a whole new era of engineering. In a study published in July, a team from Sandia National Laboratories and Texas A&M
Plants, animals, and many fungi typically grow through the process of binary fission, a form of asexual reproduction that allows a cell to divide, multiply, and produce new cells that are specialized for certain activities. Not all macrosopic organisms play by the rulebook, though. A number of large seaweeds, like the leafy green algae Caulerpa,
According to the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, men should drink 3.7 litres of water a day and women 2.7 litres. Now imagine a crew of three heading to the Moon for a 3 week trip, that’s something of the order of 189 litres of water, that’s about 189 kilograms! Assuming you
A newly discovered trade-off in the way time-keeping devices operate on a fundamental level could set a hard limit on the performance of large-scale quantum computers, according to researchers from the Vienna University of Technology. While the issue isn’t exactly pressing, our ability to grow systems based on quantum operations from backroom prototypes into practical
Researchers propose that a taste for fermented morsels may have triggered a surprising jump in the growth rate of our ancestors’ brains. In fact, a shift from a raw diet to one that included food items already partially broken down by microbes may have been a crucial event in our brain’s evolution, according to a
The World Economic Forum warns there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish by 2050. Plastics are quite literally everywhere, and now a new study suggests common plastic additives are turning shrimp-like crustaceans off sex. “These creatures are commonly found on European shores, where they make up a substantial amount of the diet
Astronomers have spotted signs of an extended disk of dust and gas, whirling in orbit around a distant star. There’s nothing unusual about this. It’s a normal stage in the development of a star and its planetary system. What makes this find so spectacular is that it’s the first ever seen around a star in
In humans, nodding off for a few seconds is a clear sign of insufficient sleep – and can be dangerous in some situations, such as when driving a car. But a new study published on Thursday finds chinstrap penguins snooze thousands of times per day, accumulating their daily sleep requirement of more than 11 hours
The vast amounts of digital information produced every day (including this article) have to be stored somewhere, and China is embarking on an innovative idea for its latest bank of data centers: putting them underwater. Data centers are vast racks of computer storage, holding everything from your Spotify playlists to your Gmail messages. While fitting
Particle accelerators are hugely useful in scientific research, but – like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – usually take up vast amounts of room. A remarkable new system developed at the University of Texas in Austin could change this. In experiments, researchers were able to use their particle accelerator to generate an electron beam with
Imagine you’re a farmer searching for eggs in the chicken coop – but instead of a chicken egg, you find an ostrich egg, much larger than anything a chicken could lay. That’s a little how our team of astronomers felt when we discovered a massive planet, more than 13 times heavier than Earth, around a
There’s a marked difference between how quickly mammals (including ourselves) age and how quickly many species of reptiles and amphibians do. This discrepancy, one scientist proposes, could be due to the dominance of dinosaurs millions of years ago, during a critical period of mammalian history. Microbiologist João Pedro de Magalhães from the University of Birmingham
A stunning river of stars has been spotted flowing through the intergalactic space in a cluster of galaxies about 300 million light years away. Such bridges are known as stellar streams; and, at a length of 1.7 million light-years, the newly named Giant Coma Stream is the longest we’ve ever seen. And that’s not all:
More than 50 years after the last Apollo mission, the United States will try once again to land a craft on the Moon on January 25, said the head of what could be the first private company to successfully touch down on the lunar surface. The lander, named Peregrine, will have no one on board.
One of the most well-studied marine mammals in the world has been secretly harboring a superpower sixth sense. Two captive bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) have now proved to researchers at the University of Rostock and Nuremberg Zoo in Germany that they can reliably sense weak electric fields in the water with their long snouts. The
Generating life out of an organic soup is a complicated business. You need a whole bunch of ingredients, all together in the same place, in the right conditions. While the precise conditions might be is still a matter of debate, we have a decent idea of which items on the periodic table are required. One
If it were not for the traditional custodians of an old-growth forest in the Solomon Islands, scientists may have never caught a glimpse of it: a rodent species of unusual size, quietly living in the trees and crunching through coconuts with its giant, sharp teeth. Measuring roughly the length of a newborn baby and weighing
ChatGPT was launched on 30 November 2022, ushering in what many have called artificial intelligence’s breakout year. Within days of its release, ChatGPT went viral. Screenshots of conversations snowballed across social media, and the use of ChatGPT skyrocketed to an extent that seems to have surprised even its maker, OpenAI. By January, ChatGPT was seeing
China’s Zhurong rover was equipped with a ground-penetrating radar system, allowing it to peer beneath Mars‘s surface. Researchers have announced new results from the scans of Zhurong’s landing site in Utopia Planitia, saying they identified irregular polygonal wedges located at a depth of about 35 meters all along the robot’s journey. The objects measure from
A new study has found that the impending peak in the Sun’s activity cycle will likely arrive significantly sooner than previously predicted. According to an analysis by astrophysicists Priyansh Jaswal, Chitradeep Saha, and Dibyendu Nandy at the Center of Excellence in Space Sciences India, solar maximum is likely to hit in January 2024. This is
A herd of elephants in Malaysia smashed up a car after it struck one of their babies on Sunday night. That (frankly understandable) response shows how the highly emotional animals will do anything to protect their own, an elephant advocate said. “If you put yourself in their position, if your kid was hit by a
Ever since the spooky phenomenon of superconductivity was discovered in 1911, scientists have been searching for superconducting materials that work under practical conditions. If only they could find a compound in which electrical resistance vanishes at room temperature and ambient pressure – not extreme cold and ultrahigh forces – then we could finally step into
A planetary system not so far from the Solar System has six worlds orbiting their star in beautiful, perfect harmony. Each of the six exoplanets orbiting the bright star HD 110067 has an orbit in lockstep with the adjacent exoplanets, resulting in a rare phenomenon known as a chain of resonance. This suggests that the system
A BBC report about a cruise passenger who said that he was bitten by a wolf spider, which then laid eggs inside his toe, went viral on Monday. But the story has attracted criticism from experts, who say it doesn’t add up. The BBC reported that a cruise ship passenger named Colin Blake received medical
Picture this: you’re nestled comfortably in your seat cruising towards your holiday destination when a flight attendant’s voice breaks through the silence: “Ladies and gentlemen, both pilots are incapacitated. Are there any passengers who could land this plane with assistance from air traffic control?” If you think you could manage it, you’re not alone. Survey
Astronauts visiting the alien skies of the red planet might one day feast their eyes on a view like the one above. It’s a new image of the horizon of Mars, snapped by NASA’s Odyssey orbiter as it looped its way around the planet, from an altitude of about 400 kilometers (250 miles) – similar
Galaxies come in many shapes and sizes. The Milky Way, for example, is a spiral galaxy because of the way that stars, dust, and gas spiral out from the center of the galaxy. But spiral galaxies like ours are surprisingly rare in our galactic neighborhood, and for years, astronomers have wondered why since the 1960s.
The explosive end of non-avian dinosaurs is the most infamous blow to life on Earth. But there’s long been hints that the asteroid may not be the main culprit behind this mass extinction, just the most spectacular isolated contribution. Before this dramatic event, 66 million years ago, toxic winds of change were already brewing in
Those blissfully peaceful months we spend in the womb before being born could be where our language learning starts, according to a new study that offers fresh insights into the ease with which newborns are able to pick up listening and speaking skills. A team of researchers, led by experts at the University of Padua
The Earth’s magnetic field plays a big role in protecting people from hazardous radiation and geomagnetic activity that could affect satellite communication and the operation of power grids. And it moves. Scientists have studied and tracked the motion of the magnetic poles for centuries. The historical movement of these poles indicates a change in the
Stars are gravitationally fastened to their galaxies and move in concert with their surroundings. But sometimes, something breaks the bond. If a star gets too close to a supermassive black hole, for example, the black hole can expel it out into space as a rogue star. What would happen to Earth if one of these
Let’s face it, going to space is havoc on the human body. We evolved in an Earth environment, over hundreds of millions of years; so take away the Earth environment and things start going a little awry. There’s bone and muscle density loss. There’s vision problems from too much fluid in the brain; without gravity,
The notion of black holes is one that invokes terror and dread. They’re inescapable! They devour everything! Nothing ever comes out! The accuracy of these beliefs falls on the spectrum of debatable to incorrect. And a pair of physicists has now calculated how proverbial blood might be wrung from the black hole stone. According to
Honeybees in man-made hives may have been suffering the cold unnecessarily for over a century because commercial hive designs are based on erroneous science, my new research shows. For 119 years, a belief that the way honeybees cluster together gives them a kind of evolutionary insulation has been fundamental for beekeeping practice, hive design and
Flicking the switch on any kind of electrical device triggers a marching band of charged particles stepping to the beat of the circuit’s voltage. But a new discovery in exotic materials known as strange metals has found electricity doesn’t always move in step, and can in fact sometimes bleed in a way that has physicists
You’re out for dinner with a bunch of friends, one of whom orders pizza with anchovies and olives to share, but you hate olives and anchovies! Do you pipe up with your preferred choice – Hawaiian – or stay quiet? This scene plays out every day around the world. Some people ferociously defend their personal
The extraordinary capacity for the brain to rewire itself after a stroke, an amputation, or sudden loss of vision or hearing has been shown repeatedly in studies over decades. At least, that’s what we all thought. Now, writing in eLife, two neuroscientists – Tamar Makin and John Krakauer – argue that the most influential experiments
In 2013, a group of scientists squeezed through a deep, twisting cave system to examine hundreds of bones belonging to a newly discovered species of human ancestor named Homo naledi . Ever since, the cave and its bones have challenged our understanding of human evolution. The remains bore a puzzling mix of primitive and modern-looking
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