In the crop fields of Argentina, bees have been building nests for their young out of some strange materials. For the first time, scientists have found bee nests made entirely out of plastic waste. A lot of plastic in the form of packaging comes into farms, and often makes its way into the landscape. The
Month: May 2019
Based on this recently released snapshot of the night sky captured by NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), we can safely assume Superman gets no sleep at night. Just look at that thing. The sparkling dots and tangled loops are the result of nearly two years of effort to study cosmic sources of X-rays
Astronomers have detected the presence of ammonia mixed in with the rusty colouration of Pluto’s surface. This could have fascinating implications for the icy dwarf planet, as researchers have detailed in two new studies. Firstly, that ammonia-tainted ice hints at a salty, organic-rich ocean hiding beneath Pluto’s surface – one that may contain the right
Parents that make a point of being generous with their money could inspire greater financial responsibility in their kids. Alongside budgeting and saving, a new psychology study suggests that responsible giving is one of the most valuable lessons a child can learn about money. Interviewing individuals of all generations, the research is some of the
Earth is not one to sit still. For roughly 3 billion years, our planet has been perpetually recycling its ocean floor, swallowing up old oceanic crust in some areas and pouring out new seabed in others. Diamonds, it would seem, are the beautiful byproducts of all this restlessness. Tipped off by tiny traces of trapped salt,
Deep below the frozen wastelands of Antarctica, scientists have discovered ancient tectonic plate structures that are having a huge impact on melting patterns around the continent’s largest ice shelf. The hidden rock, in place for hundreds of millions of years, is controlling water flow around the gigantic Ross Ice Shelf. This shelf currently acts as
Every 11 years, the Sun cycles through from riotous flare and sunspot activity to a quieter period, before ramping up again. It’s almost as regular as clockwork, and for years astronomers have been wondering what causes it. Now, they’ve proposed a new solution. Even though the Solar System’s planets are much smaller than the Sun,
As far as mysteries of nature go, ball lightning is one of the more perplexing. It seems there are as many potential explanations as there are sightings, but in spite of decades of intense interest, none stand out as a clear winner. One of the weirder hypotheses claims these glowing balls are nothing more than
A new artificial intelligence created by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pulls off a staggering feat: by analyzing only a short audio clip of a person’s voice, it reconstructs what they might look like in real life. The AI’s results aren’t perfect, but they’re pretty good – a remarkable and somewhat terrifying example
A lab-created analogue of a black hole has provided new evidence that these mysterious space objects really do emit radiation. This evidence is indirect: physicists have shown that the analogue has a temperature, which is a necessary prerequisite for the eponymous radiation predicted by Stephen Hawking. Under general relativity, a black hole is inescapable. Its
A Canadian man has pleaded guilty to smuggling thousands of live medicinal leeches into the country, bundled up inside a reusable grocery bag, according to the Canadian government. Ippolit Bodounov will pay a US$15,000 fine for the slimy heist, and had to turn over his nearly 5,000 leeches to authorities, Environment and Climate Change Canada
On May 29, 1919, a solar eclipse forever altered our conception of gravity, rewrote the laws of physics and turned a 40-year-old, wild-haired scientist into a global celebrity – the very personification of scientific genius. It was a very good day for Albert Einstein. The 1919 eclipse across South America and Africa provided direct evidence
For a species as young and puny as humans, every ancient fossil is a most extraordinary gift from our planet’s vast history. Even so, this 50-million-year-old bunch of dead fish might just be the coolest fossil we’ve ever seen. An unassuming slab of limestone from the Green River Formation in North America became the final
Tornadoes have been popping up every day in the US as if coming off an assembly line. They’re part of an explosion of extreme weather events, including record flooding, record cold and record heat. Wednesday brought more of the same, with tornado watches in the Midwest and Atlantic seaboard and 37 million Americans facing an
When you get close to a blazing star, you can discern a region where medium-sized planets like our own icy Neptune are scarce. Known as Hot Neptunian Deserts, these rings of intense irradiation and heat are found right across the Universe – but they may not be as inhospitable as we once thought. Like Icarus
For the first time, researchers have successfully generated electricity from americium, one of the radioactive elements we’ve pinned our hopes on as a promising alternative to rocket fuel, for powering farther and farther ventures out into space. It’s a new milestone in experiments with the synthetic element, which doesn’t occur naturally but is a by-product
A star system located some 16,000 light-years away from Earth is flaring in an unexpected manner, and scientists are working to explain what’s going on with it. The star in question is called AG Draconis: a well-known binary star that’s been observed by astronomers since the late 19th century. But while AG Draconis may have
The citizens of St. Paul Island off the coast of Alaska are used to finding the occasional seabird washed up on the shore. But until recently, dead tufted puffins were rare finds, especially during the winter months. Now, something has changed. By the time January drew to a close in 2017, the number of puffin carcasses
You know how stars do. They’re out there, doing their thing, fusing a whole bunch of hydrogen into helium, shining up the joint. But some stars are just a little bit different from the norm. Not content with simply lighting up the night sky like a giant disco, they zoom, shimmer, dim and even hang
Let’s face it – compared to Mars, our planet is a biological paradise dripping with moisture and relative absence of toxic chemistry. If we want to know what life might look like on the Red Planet, we need to go hunting in extreme environments. Ethiopia’s Dallol geothermal area could qualify. Minerals from one of the
After early humans took their first fledgling steps out of Africa and began dispersing across the landmass of Eurasia, what paths did they choose to travel, and why? The answers might not be what we once thought. New research exploring this fundamental chapter of human migration reveals that routes we didn’t consider possible may have
Between 1990 and 2005, the Philippines lost 32.3 percent of its forest cover. Illegal logging has historically been a huge issue for the country, but now the Philippines House of Representatives has put forward a new way of dealing with the problem: a bill that requires students to plant 10 trees each before graduating. House Bill
A strange feature on the surface of Mars has kept scientists guessing about its origin. It’s a surface deposit of a mineral which is more common in the interiors of planets. A new study shows that this interior mineral was probably brought to the surface by an ancient explosive volcano. Nili Fossae is located in
Humans and our primate relatives differ in many ways, but the fact we walk on two legs is one of the most obvious. Precisely how our ancestors evolved that trait is a well-debated mystery. Now, there’s a new idea. What if one of the contributing factors was giant explosions in the sky? It’s not as
Nature is constantly posing for that perfect shot. Many of us might be lucky to see it, but few are ever in the right position to capture the moment. Canadian photographer Steve Biro happened to be at the right place at just the right time. The result is a stunning image of a bald eagle
Human bodies cannot function properly above a certain altitude. We work best at sea level, where oxygen levels are adequate for our brains and lungs. But if climbers want to summit Mount Everest, the tallest peak in the world at 29,029 feet (8,848 meters or 5.5 miles) above sea level, they have to brave what’s
You wouldn’t ordinarily want to seek out a computer with viruses installed, but that’s exactly what the winner of a US$1.345 million auction just did – picking up a laptop crammed with the deadliest malware of our time in return for their cash. The buyer remains anonymous but we know much more about the laptop,
A stunning image of Earth taken from the orbital perspective of the International Space Station (ISS) gives a unique glimpse of an everyday phenomenon too easily taken for granted. In a photo posted to Twitter last week, NASA astronaut Christina H. Koch showed what it looks like from the ISS as darkness creeps over one
A newly revealed patent application filed by Amazon is raising privacy concerns over an envisaged upgrade to the company’s smart speaker systems. This change would mean that, by default, the devices end up listening to and recording everything you say in their presence. Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant system that runs on the company’s Echo series
One of the most profound similarities between Earth and Mars, one which makes it a popular target for research and exploration, is the presence of water ice on its surface (mainly in the form of its polar ice caps). But perhaps even more interesting is the presence of glaciers beneath the surface, which is something
With the death of Tam, the last male Sumatran rhino in Malaysia, another nail has been hammered into the species’ coffin. Now, only one female Sumatran rhino named Iman remains in the country, ending efforts to produce offspring. Tam fell ill in late April, losing his appetite and energy, and the decline was rapid. On
The first known sighting of an albino panda has taken place in China, revealing a uniquely pale bear cub padding through a lush green bamboo forest. This unprecedented vision was not seen directly by human eyes, but was captured by an infrared camera triggered when the panda moved into its motion-activated scopes. We’re lucky it
The first launch this year of a Roscosmos Soyuz 2-1b rocket from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia went off without a hitch. Yes, even despite a bolt of lightning that struck the booster as it made its ascent. At 06:23 UTC on Monday 27 May, the rocket lifted off to deliver a Glonass-M navigation satellite
There are a handful of major science institutions around the world that keep track of the Earth’s temperature. They all clearly show that the world’s temperature has risen in the past few decades. One of those institutions is NASA. NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Science Studies (GISS) is located in New York City. Recently, they
An Australian teenager and self-proclaimed Apple fanboy – who can’t be identified for legal reasons – has been found guilty of hacking into Apple’s systems in 2015 and 2017. The 17-year-old teen from Adelaide in South Australia, along with another teenager, hacked into the tech giant’s mainframe for the first time when he was 13
The way information travels inside the cells of our bodies is not unlike the wiring inside a computer chip, according to a new study that has unveiled the intricate workings of a network of calcium ions as intracellular messengers. According to researchers from the University of Edinburgh in the UK, this “cell-wide web” uses a
Scientists have discovered a ‘unique archive’ of ocean water that still exists virtually undisturbed from the last Ice Age some 20,000 years ago. Palaeoceanography – which investigates the makeup of ancient oceans lost to history – invariably relies on proxy methods, since such bodies of water have inevitably long since disappeared. But if you have
Last week SpaceX launched 60 Starlink telecommunication satellites – the first major launch of its ambitious fleet of up to 12,000 satellites, with the goal to eventually create ultra-fast internet services around the world. The launch of the 227 kg (500 pound) satellites went off without a hitch, but a spectacular video of the ‘train’
All water ice is not made equal. Under certain conditions, its neatly ordered crystalline lattice molecules fall into disarray until it resembles the structural omnishambles of amorphous solids such as glass and plastic. We thought we had a rough idea of how this worked, but a new observation has now thrown a team of researchers
South Africa’s Makhonjwa Mountains are home to some of the oldest rocks on the planet – but not everything in this magnificent landscape originated on Earth. Scientists say they’ve discovered trace evidence of extraterrestrial organic matter buried within volcanic sediment from over 3.3 billion years ago. “This is the very first time that we have found
Humans may not be able to burp properly in space, but we can now edit a genome. For the first time, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have used CRISPR-Cas9 to edit the DNA of brewer’s yeast. The goal wasn’t to create super space yeast. The astronauts were studying how DNA repair mechanisms work
There’s no sense in sugar-coating it – Venus is a hellish place! It is the hottest planet in the Solar System, with atmospheric temperatures that are hot enough to melt lead. The air is also a toxic plume, composed predominantly of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid rain clouds. And yet, scientists hypothesize that Venus was
Staffers at the New England Aquarium last winter were setting up for an after-hours event near the Amazon rain forest exhibit when they made an unexpected discovery. Anna the anaconda – 30 pounds (13.6 kilograms), 8 years old and 10 feet (3 meters) long – had given birth to a litter of baby snakes. Aquarium
A volcano erupted on the Indonesian island of Bali Saturday, sending ash into the sky over surrounding villages and lava pouring down its sides. The island’s Mount Agung put national agencies on notice, causing some flight cancellations but no reported casualties with the eruption, which reportedly spread lava and incandescent rocks over about two miles.
Anjali Kulkarni, an Indian mountain climber, trained for six years to make it to the top of Mount Everest, the highest mountain peak in the world. She finally fulfilled her longtime goal when she reached the summit this week. But it was the descent that killed her. Her son, Shantanu Kulkarni, told CNN that she died after
Somewhere in the outer reaches of the Solar System, beyond the orbit of Neptune, something wonky is happening. A few objects are orbiting differently from everything else, and we don’t know why. A popular hypothesis is that an unseen object called Planet Nine could be messing with these orbits; astronomers are avidly searching for this planet. But
Earth will be getting not one but two visitors from space this weekend. Astronomers expect an asteroid known as 1999 KW4 to swing by the Earth at around 7:05 p.m. ET on Saturday — and when it does, it’ll bring along its very own moon. “It’s one of the closest binary flybys probably in recent
Over the past few days a pair of spectacular fireballs have graced Australia’s skies. The first, in the early hours of Monday, May 20, flashed across the Northern Territory, and was seen from both Tennant Creek and Alice Springs, more than 500km apart. [embedded content] The second came two days later, streaking over South Australia
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