Just when you think orcas couldn’t possible be any more awesome, they get even better. New evidence shows these whales are really good at scaring off the most feared beast in the sea. Yep. Orcas have toppled the great white shark off their ‘apex predator’ throne. A team of marine scientists has found that great
Month: June 2019
SpaceX just provided a raft of significant updates on the launch of its first five dozen internet-providing satellites. The long-term goal of the program, called Starlink, is to eventually launch thousands of satellites into orbit around Earth in order to bathe the planet in high-speed internet access. Elon Musk’s company rocketed the first 60 spacecraft
During winter time, some snapping turtles like to hibernate in ponds and lakes. Safely tucked away underneath a thin layer of ice, these freshwater reptiles can survive up to six months without any oxygen to speak of. How their bodies can cope with this depends on the way they were raised, it turns out. New
Northern Spain is facing its largest forest fires in two decades as the heat wave scorching much of Europe continues to intensify. The fires have swept across Spanish province of Tarragona, near Barcelona, with officials warning that it could eventually engulf as much as 20,000 hectares (200 square kilometers) of land. “We’re facing a serious
For the first time, scientists have clearly linked together two types of gamma-ray phenomena in thunderclouds, suggesting that weak bursts of gamma-ray activity might precede lightning flashes in certain conditions. The two phenomena in question are weak emissions called gamma-ray glows, which last about a minute, and much shorter and more intense terrestrial gamma-ray flashes
Turns out fungus might be better suited for space travel than people are. New research has found that mould can survive incredibly high doses of ionising radiation, which means we may have to keep a very careful eye out for spores that might hitch a ride to Mars. Blasted with radiation in a controlled setting,
Nothing says welcome to the future like having your wound fixed by a tiny lightsaber. It might sound wild at first, but that’s basically what a new plasma technology advance is now promising. This exciting development means we could soon commercialise low-temperature atmospheric pressure plasma jets (APPJs) that operate out in open air, promising a
Sometimes you just need to take a step back from the huge number of issues here on Earth, take a deep breath, and stare at the soothing movements of the solar photosphere. In this case, thanks to the Swedish 1-meter Solar Telescope (SST) in Spain, you can enjoy a close-up of the pulsing blobs moving
Around a young star not far from Earth, a broad disc of dust swirls. This is the stuff that planets are made of – and astronomers think a huge clump spotted and photographed in the outer edge of the disc is in the early stages of becoming one. If they’re right, this will mark the
Scientists have long speculated that at the heart of a gas giant, the laws of material physics undergo some radical changes. In these kinds of extreme pressure environments, hydrogen gas is compressed to the point that it actually becomes a metal. For years, scientists have been looking for a way to create metallic hydrogen synthetically
For its newest planetary science mission, NASA aims to land a flying robot on the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan, a top target in the search for alien life. Dragonfly will be the first endeavor of its kind. NASA’s car-sized quadcopter, equipped with instruments capable of identifying large organic molecules, is slated to launch in
We know inoculation halts the spread of disease. As it turns out, the same concept can also be used for misinformation. Researchers at the University of Cambridge think they’ve found a way to ‘inoculate’ the public against fake news. All it takes is an online role-playing game, where anyone who wishes can safely enter the mindset of
This April, renewables were put to the test like never before. For the first time in United States history, clean energy sources shouldered more of the nation’s electricity needs than coal. A monthly report from the Energy Information Administration shows that renewables such as wind, solar, and hydroelectric dams provided 23 percent of the month’s
For the first time, scientists have found a blue-feathered bird in the fossil record, thanks to a new discovery that lets us tell which fossilised pigments are, in fact, blue. After millions of years of fossilisation, feathers are long gone, but melanin pigment packages called melanosomes can be preserved – up until now the problem
Every now and again, our radio telescopes capture a mystery. A single flash, as powerful in radio wavelengths as half-a-billion Suns, condensed into a burst that lasts just a few milliseconds at most. Now, for the very first time, astrophysicists have traced one of these one-off fast radio bursts (FRBs) to its source. “This is the
It seems like the stuff of dreams, the idea that humanity will one day venture beyond the Solar System and become an interstellar species. Who knows? Given enough time and the right technology (and assuming there’s not some serious competition), we might even be able to colonize the entire Milky Way galaxy someday. And while
You’ve got to hand it to the cockroach. Human progress might be an apocalypse for other animal species, but not these guys. And now it’s clear they’re having a jolly good laugh at our puny attempts to control them with pesticides. A study on how quickly populations of German cockroach (Blattella germanica) bounce back after
In 1949, famous physicist Lars Onsager published a paper discussing the potential implications of superfluids and turbulence. Now, 70 years later, a team of Australian researchers has conducted an experiment to back his theory – using a tiny quantum version of Jupiter’s ‘Great Red Spot’ to do it. The swirling fluids on the surface of
For the first time, scientists have used artificial intelligence to create complex, three-dimensional simulations of the Universe. It’s called the Deep Density Displacement Model, or D3M, and it’s so fast and so accurate that the astrophysicists who designed it don’t even know how it does what it does. What it does is accurately simulate the
As far as feathered animals go, Pachystruthio dmanisensis was a monster. With an estimated mass of about 450 kilograms (nearly half a tonne), it would make a 150-kilogram adult ostrich – the world’s largest living bird – look like a canary. Bigger birds have existed, but it’s not so much its size that makes this flightless
Researchers at Princeton released a new study on how many online shopping sites use coercive so-called “dark pattern” techniques to trick people into spending more money. “This is manipulating users into making decisions they wouldn’t otherwise make and buying stuff they don’t need,” Gunes Acar, a research associate at Princeton who helped run the study,
Subglacial lakes are some of the least explored and most important natural features on Earth. We have also vastly underestimated their prevalence and impact. Now, more than 400 of these lakes have been found beneath the Antarctic continent. Yet as recently as the 1950s, scientists thought this ice sheet contained no liquid water whatsoever. Now,
Our entire living reality happens in a three-dimensional Universe, so naturally it’s hard to imagine a universe with just two dimensions. But, according to new calculations, a 2D universe could actually support life, too. The new paper is the work of physicist James Scargill at the University of California, Davis, who wanted to test the
The super-thin ‘wonder material’ graphene has been shaking up science for years with its amazing properties, but things get really interesting when you stack this 2D nanomaterial up against itself. In new experiments, physicists in the US have found that when graphene is assembled in a double-layer vertical stack – with two adjacent sheets of
With the ability to use tools, solve complex puzzles, and even play tricks on humans just for funsies, octopuses are fiercely smart. But their intelligence is quite weirdly built, since the eight-armed cephalopods have evolved differently from pretty much every other type of organism on Earth. Rather than a centralised nervous system such as vertebrates have,
If you swallow a bunch of cyanide or breathe in too much carbon monoxide, you are in for a pretty bad time, since both are poisonous to humans. But they may have been instrumental to our very existence – and new evidence suggests both were carried here on meteorites. In a type of carbon-rich meteorite
In the bewildering quagmire that is the gas between the stars, the Hubble Space Telescope has identified evidence of ionised buckminsterfullerene, the carbon molecule known colloquially as “buckyballs”. Containing 60 carbon atoms arranged in a soccer ball shape, buckminsterfullerene (C60) occurs naturally here on Earth – in soot. But in 2010, it was also detected in
A core part of a SpaceX rocket narrowly missed a landing pad, crashed into the sea, and exploded during a test that CEO Elon Musk described as the “most difficult” in company history. At around 2:30 am ET (7:30 am UTC) on Tuesday, a Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, which was
In latest gruesome nature news, scientists have discovered new details on a fungus that compels its cicada hosts to mate long after their genitals have gone and their bodies have turned into what one researcher colourfully describes as ‘flying salt shakers of death’. The fungus is called Massospora cicadina, and its effects read like an abstinence
From the air, the massive crater resembles a pink virus floating against a pool of green. But from the ground, the destruction is clear and devastating: A 33-foot (10 meter) wide, 13-foot (4 meter) gouge into the earth that began in the 1940s with an Allied sortie and ended Sunday morning in a massive blast
An intense heat wave is set to bake Europe in coming days, and it could be historic, potentially shattering records across a large portion of the continent. The heat wave is expected to peak between Wednesday and Friday, when a swath from Spain to Poland is expected to see temperatures at least 20 to 30
You’d think it would be easy to spot a whale shark having sex – after all, they’re amongst the largest creatures on Earth. But to this day, we have no record of their encounters, even though this week one human did get tantalisingly close. Flying above the remote Ningaloo reef in Western Australia, pilot Tiffany
An ancient water conservation technique once used in Peru could be making a comeback in the modern era, as the country struggles with extreme dry seasons amidst a population rise. Researchers estimate the technique – used by indigenous peoples of the region – is at least 1,400 years old. It involves diverting water from streams
Scientists have recreated Titan-like conditions in a lab, and found that organic molecules from Titan’s atmosphere could be forming rings of alien crystals around the methane lakes that dot the Saturn moon’s surface. Previously, the team led by researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory had discovered two of these ‘molecular minerals’. Now they’ve discovered a
Chernobyl has become a byword for catastrophe. The 1986 nuclear disaster, recently brought back into the public eye by the hugely popular TV show of the same name, caused thousands of cancers, turned a once populous area into a ghost city, and resulted in the setting up of an exclusion zone 2600 km² in size.
Tucked away in a remote valley of Brazil’s Serra da Capivara National Park, a group of bearded capuchin monkeys use round quartz stones to crack open cashew nuts on tree roots or other rocks. Beneath their feet, archaeologists have found at least 3,000-years-worth of discarded tools. The chimpanzees of Côte d’Ivoire have been using stone tools like
Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, said his rocket company’s toughest mission yet has arrived – and you can watch it live online below. Sometime between 23:30 ET on Monday (03:30 UTC on Tuesday) and 02:30 ET (06:30 UTC) on Tuesday, a Falcon Heavy rocket will try to lift off from Cape Canaveral,
If we’re serious about perpetuating the human race off our home planet one day, a human sperm bank would come in handy. While fresh sperm samples have sustained some damage under space conditions, a small pilot study now suggests frozen sperm are unperturbed by bursts of microgravity. To create such a condition, a small aerobatic
You might think that plastic pollution on land and sea is old news by now, but it’s taken on a new form we’ve only just noticed: Researchers have identified a crust of plastic particles building up on shoreline rocks. This ‘plasticrust’ isn’t just a worrying symbol of the garbage piling up in our oceans. The coating
Underneath the salty waters of the North Atlantic ocean, geologists have discovered a giant aquifer of freshwater, hidden from view just off the US coast. While the vast size of this massive cache is surprising, it’s not entirely unexpected. Signals of the water first showed up in the 1970s, but until now, nobody suspected that
On 24 June 2019, NASA is sending an atomic clock into space. Not just any old atomic clock, either. It’s up to 50 times more accurate than the atomic clocks aboard GPS satellites, its precision only changing by one second every 10 million years. It’s only the size of a toaster, yet it could revolutionise
Magic: The Gathering, the card game where you build your own deck from over 19,000 unique cards and then battle this deck against other people, is not what you would call simple. But a pre-print paper first published in March turns this already complex game up a notch, showing that a specific set of cards
It’s called the ‘White City’: a fabled settlement hidden deep in the lush rainforests of Honduras, said to be all that now remains of a mysterious civilisation that existed in Central America long before the Europeans came. But this lost city has its non-believers. For much of the last century, doubts have swirled around disputed
Last week, Curiosity made its strongest detection of methane on Mars yet. Its laser spectrometer instrument registered a methane spike of 21 parts per billion by volume (ppbv) in the Gale Crater, a region the rover has been exploring since it landed in 2012. Generally, methane presence on Mars has a global average of 10
In the pitch black waters 759 meters (2500 feet) below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, a thin, undulating arm emerges from the gloom. Suddenly, it splits, and what was a lone, curious appendage is a writhing bouquet of tentacles until, finally, an honest-to-God giant squid blooms from the darkness and attacks. Then, the
If you’ve ever felt your eyelids droop for just a fraction of a second during some mundane task — like staring at a computer screen or driving down the highway — you’ve experienced a phenomenon known as “microsleep.” Discover Magazine‘s blog The Crux recently spotlighted the experience, which happens when key parts of the brain
Great news! Humankind’s greatest-ever engineering project is nearing completion. Soon we will have warmed the Earth enough to get rid of all those pesky ice sheets and other frozen areas. The finish line is in sight. If we all work together for the next thousand years, we’ll finally reach our goal! NASA has been tracking
Galaxy mergers are not particularly rare, but they are important events. Not only for the galaxies involved, but for scientists trying to piece together how galaxies evolve. Now, astronomers using ALMA have found the earliest example yet of merging galaxies. The pair of merging galaxies in question is called B14-65666, an unwieldy name, but scientifically
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