When it comes to finding life outside of Earth, it’s hard to know where to look. The dark and icy oceans of Enceladus and Europa offer one kind of hypothetical habitat. Meanwhile, the dusty, arid landscape of Mars looks to be almost the opposite – but scientists have just found a clue that gives hope
Month: February 2019
Remember when the Solar System was simple? When you learned to say My Very Easy Method Just Sped Up Naming Planets? Astronomers just had to go mess it up, didn’t they. Now our Solar System is littered with dwarf planets and comets masquerading as asteroids and ridiculous sounding ‘moon moons‘ and we can’t deal. Thankfully the
Lots of video games let you take on the role of the anti-hero: Grand Theft Auto, Hitman, even Mario’s mischievous alter-ego, Wario. But there’s never been a video game anti-hero quite like Plague Inc. – in this massively successful pandemic simulator, you actually play the role of a deadly and contagious pathogen, hell-bent on wiping
Have you ever seen fine water condensation on a transparent surface shimmer like a rainbow? Scientists have now figured out exactly how it happens – and have used this new knowledge to make water droplets produce a dazzling array of colours. If the droplets are on a transparent surface, and lit by a single lamp,
For years, scientists have warned of the “next big one,” an earthquake so powerful that it could topple buildings, slash power, and take lives across California. As far as natural disasters go, the quake represented the worst-case-scenario for cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, which are both located along the San Andreas Fault. Now
Lab-made marijuana is coming. In a move that’s expected to transform the marijuana and pharmaceutical industries, scientists at the University of California at Berkeley announced on Wednesday that they had for the first time created cannabis compounds in a lab, instead of by harvesting them from a plant. If the technique can scale, it could
There’s a lot of junk in Earth’s orbit we don’t tend to see in our skies; a lot of that space debris is pretty small, but there are some bigger pieces. As they lose altitude, we can expect to see them again – and one could be coming rather soon. That piece of junk is Kosmos 482, a
History hasn’t left us with the best impression of the Roman emperor Nero. Depending on who you ask, he was a tyrant who robbed the throne of dignity or a narcissist who taxed the masses heavily for self-gratification. Maybe all of the above. Then there’s his face. Hey, nobody looks sexy when squished into a
People who believe in conspiracy theories might be more likely to engage in petty crime, and no, this is not a conspiracy. A new study from researchers at the University of Kent and Staffordshire University in the UK has demonstrated a link between this type of thinking and how people feel about, uh, not acting
Once again, scientists have scrutinised one of the strangest stars in the sky to understand its wild light fluctuations. The latest observations of KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby’s star or Boyajian’s star, have scanned for the kind of laser emission that could be produced by a civilisation. Well, guess what. It’s been three-and-a-half years
As far as environmental supervillains go, atmospheric carbon is the kingpin of crime. And just like in the comic books, every time we think we have a way to lock it up for good, it gets away from us. What we need is something cheap. Scalable. Something that can have a hope of ripping enough
New analysis of 40 years’ worth of satellite data shows that it’s a near-certainty that humanity is actively causing global climate change. Climate deniers often claim, in the face of overwhelming evidence, that the planet is heating up and natural disasters are becoming more intense and common just because that’s the way it is –
The newly launched Nokia 9 PureView has something no other smartphone has: a five-camera array on the back. But before the handset has even got into people’s hands, there are claims that it’s triggering trypophobia – a fear of clusters of small holes. While those with trypophobia will no doubt try their best to avoid
Stratocumulus clouds are rather boring. They’re not as elegant as cirrus clouds (those horsetail wisps high in the sky) or as majestic as cumulonimbus clouds (big, scary thunderheads). But stratocumulus clouds, which hover low in the sky and create vast decks of cloud cover, have a supreme value in our warming world: Their white tops
Winter weather in the United Kingdom is known to be raw and bleak but, on Monday, the Sun shined in all its glory and temperatures surged to levels not seen before during the cold, dark season. Temperatures in the community of Trawsgoed in Wales shot up to 69.1 degrees (20.6 Celsius), the warmest temperature ever
Over four billion years ago, when Earth was turbulent and new, a strange spark of life grew into existence. We’re not entirely sure how it happened, but evidence suggests it was deep under the sea, far below the reach of the Sun’s rays. If we can figure out how that spark formed, it could help
A man died after crashing a 2016 Tesla Model S into a tree in Miami, Florida yesterday afternoon, according to local news. The car reportedly swerved through multiple lanes of traffic before hitting a median and some trees and bursting into flames – and the death may have been related to the electric carmaker’s iconic
It was the most explosive scientific controversy of 2018: Chinese scientist He Jiankui brazenly announced in November he had created the world’s first gene-edited babies using CRISPR. He’s admission – including that twin girls called Lulu and Nana from his experiment had already been born – provoked immediate international uproar in the scientific community, with critics
Facebook’s treatment of its legions of content moderators is under scrutiny after the publication of a report alleging tough working conditions and low pay that saw some employees break down under the weight of the content they were reviewing. On Monday, The Verge’s Casey Newton published an extensive investigation into a content-moderation workplace in Arizona. These
Japan’s space agency pulled off something awesome this week. Its spacecraft Hayabusa2 touched down on asteroid Ryugu, collected a sample, and jumped off again. To remember this, we now have an epic photo of Ryugu’s surface, potentially showing marks of that historic encounter. Hayabusa2 actually arrived at Ryugu in June of last year, and dropped
This February, mother nature is keeping us occupied with a puzzling new riddle, and the solution has even got the scientists stumped: how exactly did a humpback whale end up dead on the edge of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil? It’s a curiosity that has drawn worldwide attention. The 8-metre-long carcass (26 feet) was found
We already know that cats can be as neurotic as their owners are, but just how deep are the personality ties between felines and the humans who serve look after them? Pretty deep, according to new research from scientists in the UK, who found that personality traits of cat owners correlated with related behaviours exhibited
Have you ever wondered how fish manage to survive temperatures below freezing in Antarctic waters? (You are now.) It’s a pretty neat question – and now, thanks to genome analysis, we actually have an answer. For one fish, that is. And boy is it an odd one. It’s called the Antarctic blackfin icefish (Chaenocephalus aceratus),
Billions of years ago, Mars was likely a much warmer and wetter place than the cold, dry, barren world we see today. Whether there was life there or not remains an open question. But there’s a massive, growing wall of evidence showing that Mars may have had the necessary conditions for life in the past,
Never before in American history had so many people received a text message at the exact same time. It was bearing grave, unthinkable, catastrophic news – and it wasn’t even true. A little over a year ago, this is what more than a million people in Hawaii saw on their phones, television screens, and flashing
Social media sites like YouTube are stepping up their enforcement against anti-vax content. YouTube channels that promote anti-vaccination content are not allowed to run ads on the video sharing platform, according to a policy first reported by BuzzFeed News on Friday. YouTube said that it considers anti-vaccination content to be “dangerous or harmful,” which as
At a staggering distance from the Sun, astronomers have just found what they think might be the most distant object ever identified in the Solar System. They’ve yet to characterise or define it, but it orbits the Sun at a massive distance of 140 astronomical units (AU), which puts it 3.5 times farther out than
Back in January, the New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past the furthest object we’ve ever explored - Ultima Thule. But before that, the team back on Earth managed to snap a few perfect pictures of the weirdly shaped Kuiper belt object. The most detailed of those photos has just been released by the team. “Bullseye!” said New
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover, which touched down in 2014, experienced a “hiccup” while booting up last week – but scientists on Earth have brought it back online and are working to reconstruct what went wrong. “We’re still not sure of its exact cause and are gathering the relevant data for analysis,” said Steven Lee, Curiosity’s
For centuries, the pyramids of Giza have puzzled researchers – not just their mysterious voids and hidden chambers, but exactly how ancient Egyptians built such impressive structures without modern technology. One of the most confounding issues is how the structures became so perfectly aligned. Although it’s slightly lopsided, overall the square sides of the 138.8 metre (455
Around 252 million years ago, Earth experienced catastrophic devastation – an extinction event so severe that it wiped out almost all of the life on Earth. Up to 70 percent of all land vertebrate species were killed off, and a massive 96 percent of all marine species, including the famous trilobite that had previously survived
Most of us know that at some point in our evolutionary history around 600 million years ago, single-celled organisms evolved into more complex multicellular life. But knowing that happened and actually seeing it happen in real-time in front of you is an entirely different matter altogether. And that’s exactly what researchers from the George Institute
Richard Branson’s company Virgin Galactic has flown its first passenger on a rocket-powered spaceship. The flight is part of a decades-long effort by multiple companies to usher in an era of frequent and safe suborbital space tourism, in which vehicles can fly high enough to briefly enter space, provide minutes of zero gravity, then return to
We might have a new contender for the youngest person to ever achieve nuclear fusion. Tennessee teenager Jackson Oswalt is not your average 14-year-old. While other kids are playing video games or watching TV, he’s been busy putting together a nuclear laboratory in an old playroom in his house. The budding nuclear engineer has been
Diving to the bottom of the ocean is arguably harder than rocketing into space. Hundreds of astronauts have left Earth, but you can count the people who’ve visited the very bottom of the ocean on one hand: James Cameron, Jacques Piccard, and Don Walsh. Because of that, we don’t know much about what goes on
An ice shelf in Antarctica is about to give birth to a baby. This baby is a giant, spawned by growing cracks in the Brunt Ice Shelf. It’s not clear what this’ll mean to the scientific infrastructure in the area, and to the human presence, which were both established in the 1950s. The Brunt Ice
Last week, we reported on a mysterious new website, ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com, that shows you a new human face, generated by an AI, every time you hit the refresh button. It’s a growing trend: more copycat websites like ThisAirbnbDoesNotExist.comand ThisWaifuDoesNotExist.net have also cropped up in its wake. And now, ThisCatDoesNotExist.com takes the trend to its logical conclusion:
There are an awful lot of insects. It’s hard to say exactly how many because 80 percent haven’t yet been described by taxonomists, but there are probably about 5.5 million species. Put that number together with other kinds of animals with exoskeletons and jointed legs, known collectively as arthropods – this includes mites, spiders and
Is there any dinosaur more iconic than Tyrannosaurus Rex? Its mighty jaws and fierce mien ignite the imaginations of four-year-olds everywhere. It’s the dinosaur poster child – yet this fearsome beast’s beginnings were, new evidence suggests, quite humble. How humble? Well, a little smaller than a kangaroo, as we now know from a newly discovered
From December to April in Yosemite National Park, chilly water from melting mountain snow streams toward the eastern edge of El Capitan and forms what’s known as Horsetail Falls. The cascade is predictably picturesque within the greater grandeur of one of the country’s most stunning national parks. But it becomes truly phenomenal for just a
From above, the Namib Desert in Africa appears afflicted by disease, pocked with patches of bare earth that are either touched by the gods, the dead, or the wildlife, depending on who you ask. Science had all but closed the book on these mysterious ‘fairy circles‘, placing the blame squarely on the soil. To remove
Sixty-six million years ago, something changed the world catastrophically. Around 75 percent of the world’s plant and animal species died, wiping out the dinosaurs. This marked the end of the Cretaceous period, and started a new dawn on Earth – the Cenozoic, the age of mammals. But we don’t entirely know what caused it. Fossil
Years ago, the small, ratlike rodents could be seen scurrying across the sand and coral rubble on the Australian island of Bramble Cay. Fishermen would sometimes see them while visiting the island, which is dotted with a few grass clumps, shorebirds and nesting sea turtles in the Great Barrier Reef. As mackerel fisherman Egon Stewart
Earth might have a dizzying array of life forms, but our biology ultimately remains a solitary data point – we simply don’t have a reference for life based on DNA different from our own. Now, scientists have taken matters into their hands to push the boundaries on what life could be like. Research funded by
When Charles Darwin famously visited the Galapagos Islands back in 1835, he discovered a volcanic archipelago that was home to 15 different species of giant tortoise. Today, after killing off more than 100,000 of these strange creatures, we are down to about 10 species, many of which are critically endangered. One was missing for over
Damage-resistant genes. Healing powers. Very low risk of cancer. No, scientists aren’t describing Wolverine or Superman – those are the powers of the great white shark. The star of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster, whose scientific name is Carcharodon carcharias, has a reputation as a meat-eating monster of the sea. But in fact, great white sharks may
We humans like to put labels and boundaries on things. For example, the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space is the Kármán line, the point at 100 kilometres (62 miles) altitude where aeronautics end, and astronautics take over. But Earth’s atmosphere is way more complicated than that (there’s even some debate about where the Kármán
Deep in the heart of physics there’s a lucky guess. It was an incredibly good guess, one that remains solid in the face of time and experiment, and is now a fundamental principle in quantum mechanics. It’s called the Born rule, and while it’s used for predictions, nobody truly understands how it works. But a bold
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