Strangely come, strangely go. Only days after the world first became aware of it, a mysterious metal monolith in the remote desert of Utah’s Red Rock Country has now seemingly vanished from sight. The object made headlines last week, after authorities with the Utah Department of Public Safety (DPS) announced the discovery of the strange,
Month: November 2020
On the wide open slopes of China’s Hengduan Mountains, there are perks to being a wallflower. After thousands of years of human harvesting, a rare alpine flower – prized in Chinese medicine – is trying its hardest not to stand out. In the alpine meadows where humans pluck the Fritillaria delavayi plant the most, scientists have
We all want our family life to be as happy as possible – and now researchers have identified some of the personal characteristics and skills that are most likely to make for a harmonious home. One of the key factors when it comes to healthy family and romantic relationships, it would seem, is psychological flexibility.
Cornered by a dangerous predator, a gecko can self-amputate its still twitching tail, creating a fleeting moment of distraction – a chance for the lizard to flee with its life. Small reptiles such as geckos and skinks are well known for this remarkable ability to sacrifice and then rapidly regrow their tails. Now, to scientists’ surprise,
Although the ground beneath our feet feels solid and reassuring (most of the time), nothing in this Universe lasts forever. One day, our Sun will die, ejecting a large proportion of its mass before its core shrinks down into a white dwarf, gradually leaking heat until it’s nothing more than a cold, dark, dead lump
Thousands of years ago, ancient Egyptians were laid to rest in Saqqara, an ancient city of the dead. Priests placed them inside wooden boxes adorned with hieroglyphics, and the sarcophagi were sealed and buried in tombs scattered above and below the sand. Archaeologists have discovered 160 human coffins at the site over the last three
Nature has a way of putting our best technology to shame. For decades now, scientists have been trying to manufacture the ultimate sound absorber – a carefully engineered material that can manage acoustic waves for stealthy movement or simple peace and quiet. As it turns out, however, that cherished ‘metastructure’ may already exist in the
The periodic table of the elements, principally created by the Russian chemist, Dmitry Mendeleev (1834-1907), celebrated its 150th anniversary last year. It would be hard to overstate its importance as an organising principle in chemistry – all budding chemists become familiar with it from the earliest stages of their education. Given the table’s importance, one
Throughout all known space, between the stars and the galaxies, an extremely faint glow suffuses, a relic left over from the dawn of the Universe. This is the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the first light that could travel through the Universe when it cooled enough around 380,000 years after the Big Bang for ions and electrons
Skywatchers admiring November’s full moon will also get to see another treat: a penumbral eclipse, when the Moon passes through Earth’s outer shadow, on Monday, November 30, according to NASA. The Moon will be at its fullest for only a moment — on Monday, that happens at 4:30 am EST (9:30 UTC) — but the
First we discovered platypus would look great at a rave, now wombats, bilbies and other marsupials can join the blacklight party – with scientists unexpectedly finding they all glow wonderfully fluorescent greens, blues and pinks beneath UV light. Over the last few years scientists have found biofluorescence is more common across mammals than we realised
It seems that Earth has been misplaced. According to a new map of the Milky Way galaxy, the Solar System’s position isn’t where we thought it was. Not only is it closer to the galactic centre – and the supermassive hole therein, Sagittarius A* – it’s orbiting at a faster clip. It’s nothing to be
A dwindling tribe of chimpanzees in Guinea that gained global fame for uncanny abilities to use tools has a glimmer of hope after its last fertile female gave birth. The tiny community of apes lives in a forest around the village of Bossou, in the far southeastern corner of the country. Scientists have trekked to
The discovery of a creature described as resembling a “buck-toothed toucan” that lived some 68 million years ago has upended assumptions about diversity in the birds that lived alongside dinosaurs. At less than nine centimetres (3.5 inches) long, the delicate skull of the bird scientists have dubbed Falcatakely forsterae might be easily overlooked. In fact,
Space is a hostile place. We may have developed the technology to launch astronauts into orbit and get them home safely, but scientists are still figuring out how space travel affects human health, especially over the long haul. That’s essential before any planned missions to Mars go ahead, to assure the health and safety of
Archaeologists have uncovered a “treasure trove” of artifacts as another major ice patch melts away in the Norwegian mountains, revealing a total of 68 arrows and many more items from an ancient reindeer hunting site. The earliest finds go back some 6,000 years, according to radiocarbon dating. They include reindeer bones and antlers, as well
The question of whether a 7-million-year-old primate, nicknamed ‘Toumai,’ walked on two or four legs has whipped up drama amongst palaeontologists – complete with a vanishing femur. Since the discovery of Sahelanthropus tchadensis’s first fossil back in 2001, it has often been cited as our earliest known hominin ancestor. Initial analysis suggested that Sahelanthropus regularly walked upright
The surface of the Sun is a turbulent dance of gravity, plasma, and magnetic fields. Much like the weather on Earth, its behavior can seem unpredictable, but there are patterns to be found when you look closely. The first pattern to be observed on the solar surface was that of sunspots. Sunspots were noticed by
For a long time, Hawai’i Island has been home to a mystery. Somehow, the amount of freshwater in underground aquifers has seemed much smaller than it should be, given the amount of rainfall. Scientists have just found out why. Deep underground, running below the island’s coast, vast quantities of freshwater are transported from the flanks of
The largest sharks ever to have roamed the oceans parked their young in shallow, warm-water nurseries where food was abundant and predators scarce until they could assume their title as kings and queens of the sea. But as sea levels declined in a cooling world, the brutal mega-predator, Otodus megalodons, may have found fewer and
An Egyptian mummy that was decorated with a woman’s portrait contained a surprise – the body of a child who was only 5 years old when she died. Now, scientists have learned more about the mysterious girl and her burial, thanks to high-resolution scans and X-ray ”microbeams” that targeted very small regions in the intact artifact. Computed X-ray tomography (CT)
In June of 1670 – almost exactly 350 years ago – French astronomer Voituret Anthelme recorded a ‘new’ star in the sky. In the Northern constellation of Vulpecula, a pinpoint of light flared into brightness before gradually fading from view with the naked eye over a year later. The event was classified as a nova,
An extremely magnetised star 16,700 light-years away could be the next clue in solving the mystery of fast radio bursts. In data from observations of the magnetar 1E 1547.0-5408 taken in 2009, astronomers have just discovered a pair of bursts of radio emission that look incredibly similar to bursts from SGR 1935+2154 – a magnetar
Who embedded a large metal monolith in the remote Utah desert? State wildlife officials are scratching their heads after discovering a bizarre 10-foot-tall (3 meters) installation in Red Rock Country in southeastern Utah. The shiny silver rectangle sits in the center of the dead end of one of the many shallow rock ravines that scour this desert
Before we start mining for precious metals in the darkness of the deep sea, we might try switching on the light first and observing our surroundings. In this seemingly isolated abyss, at deeper than 3,000 metres (9,800 ft) below sea level, scientists were able to coax a massive swarm of 115 cutthroat eels (Ilyophis arx)
Two of Charles Darwin’s notebooks containing his pioneering ideas on evolution and his famous “Tree of Life” sketch are missing, believed stolen, the Cambridge University Library said on Tuesday. The British scientist filled the leather notebooks in 1837 after returning from his voyage on the HMS Beagle. The library said they were worth millions of
How might The Terminator have played out if Skynet had decided it probably wasn’t responsible enough to hold the keys to the entire US nuclear arsenal? As it turns out, scientists may just have saved us from such a future AI-led apocalypse, by creating neural networks that know when they’re untrustworthy. These deep learning neural
When a dead thresher shark washed up onshore, it was obvious what had killed it – a swordfish had stabbed it from behind and left a large hunk of its “sword” embedded in the beast, a new study finds. No one saw the actual attack, so it’s unclear why the swordfish jabbed the shark. But
For decades, planetary geologists have studied tiny chunks of lunar rock to unravel the Moon’s mysteries. The rocks have revealed how old the Moon is, helped scientists estimate the age of other planets, and offered insight into how turbulent our Solar System once was. But nobody has collected any new Moon rocks for more than 40 years.
When stars like the Sun reach the end of their lives, the object that remains is a white dwarf. This is the star’s shrunken, naked core, no longer capable of nuclear fusion. It shines, but only with residual heat, slowly cooling over billions of years until it’s completely cold and dark. But not all white
The mighty Arecibo telescope will be closed forever, the US National Science Foundation has decided. But the radio telescope which brought us confirmation of the first exoplanet in 1992 will undoubtedly live on in the hearts and minds of scientists, many of who took to social media to mourn the end of an era and to
Just before going into a hallucinogenic trance, Indigenous Californians who had gathered in a cave likely looked up toward the rocky ceiling, where a pinwheel and big-eyed moth were painted in red. This mysterious “pinwheel,” is likely a depiction of the delicate, white flower of Datura wrightii, a powerful hallucinogen that the Chumash people took not
We’ve seen evidence that COVID-19 lockdowns have reduced at least some forms of pollution, temporarily – but the overall picture remains disturbingly grim, according to new figures from the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). The WMO says that there will be a reduction in global CO2 emissions for 2020 – but that it won’t
As our need for electronic gadgets and sensors grows, scientists are coming up with new ways to keep devices powered for longer on less energy. The latest sensor to be invented in the lab can go for a whole year on a single burst of energy, aided by a physics phenomenon known as quantum tunnelling.
Microplastics of our own making are turning up in the rain, wind, soil, and snow of the most remote and mountainous regions on our planet. First they were found in the French Pyrenees. Then it was the North American Rocky Mountains. Now it’s Nepal’s Sagarmāthā National Park – home of Mount Everest, the tallest peak
Greenland is the largest island in the world and on it rests the largest ice mass in the Northern Hemisphere. If all that ice melted, the sea would rise by more than 7 metres. But that’s not going to happen, is it? Well, not any time soon, but understanding how much of the ice sheet
The clouds that hang low and thick in our sky, reflecting sunlight back out into space, are melting into thin air as the world warms. The loss will not only trigger greater climate changes than we expected, but new research suggests it could also undermine the potential of future geoengineering solutions. The idea of seeding
Is that light particle more like a ball careening through space, or more of a smeary mess that is everywhere at once? The answer depends on whether the absurd laws of subatomic particles or the deterministic equations that govern larger objects hold more sway. Now, for the first time, physicists have found a way to
In nature, diamonds form deep in the Earth over billions of years. This process requires environments with exceptionally high pressure and temperatures exceeding 1,000℃. Our international team has created two different types of diamond at room temperature — and in a matter of minutes. It’s the first time diamonds have successfully been produced in a
A giant underground river fed by melting ice could be running in a state of perpetual darkness far below the surface of Greenland, according to new research. Nicknamed the ‘Dark River’, this hypothetical waterway – if it truly exists, that is – may stretch for 1,000 kilometres (620 miles), flowing from the deep interior of
Four astronauts were successfully launched on the SpaceX Crew Dragon “Resilience” to the International Space Station on Sunday, the first of what the US hopes will be many routine missions following a successful test flight in late spring. Three Americans – Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker – and Japan’s Soichi Noguchi blasted off
We witnessed an amazing astronomical spectacle in the early morning skies over the Kuwaiti desert in November 1998. That year, the Leonid meteors put on a spectacular display, topping an estimated 1,000 meteors per hour near sunrise. On most years, however, the Lion whimpers with a few paltry meteors per hour, but once every 33
Climate change is testing the resilience of our planet’s birds. While tropical avian species appear especially vulnerable to habitat loss, drought, natural disasters, and declining prey, new research suggests they can withstand heat waves quite well. Using the largest dataset of its kind, the research calls into question a commonly-held conclusion that tropical birds, living
NASA has given SpaceX the go-ahead to launch its first full crew of four astronauts toward the International Space Station (ISS). If all goes according to plan, the company’s Falcon 9 rocket will roar off its historic launchpad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on Sunday night, careen through Earth’s atmosphere, and jettison a Crew Dragon
With global travel curtailed during the COVID-19 pandemic, many people are finding comfort in planning future trips. But imagine that you finally arrive in Venice and the “floating city” is flooded. Would you stay anyway, walking through St. Mark’s Square on makeshift catwalks or elevated wooden passages – even if you couldn’t enter the Basilica or
Egypt announced Saturday the discovery of an ancient treasure trove of more than 100 intact sarcophagi, dating back more than 2,500 years ago, the largest such find this year. The sealed wooden coffins, unveiled on-site amid much fanfare, belonged to top officials of the Late Period and the Ptolemaic period of ancient Egypt. They were
In its 4.6 billion-year-long history, Mars has taken its fair share of punches from hurtling asteroids and careening comets. Today, the surface of the red planet is covered in no less than 43,000 impact craters larger than 5 kilometres; some ancient regions have received more of a beating than others. In the ancient Martian highlands of Noachis
The ocean floor of the South Pacific contains traces of ancient dust that may have changed Earth’s very climate, and new research suggests it came all the way from beneath ice-age glaciers of what is now Argentina. Whipped up by strong westerly winds some 20,000 years ago, these microscopic minerals would have circumnavigated nearly the