National Geographic magazines and Indiana Jones movies might have you picturing archaeologists excavating near Egyptian pyramids, Stonehenge, and Machu Picchu. And some of us do work at these famous places. But archaeologists like us want to learn about how people from the past lived all over the planet. We rely on left-behind artifacts to help fill
Month: December 2020
If you’re a primate or a koala (hello, koala readers!), you have something different compared to other animals: fingerprints. Now, a new study explains how our fingerprints help us keep a grip on the surfaces that we come into contact with – and it’s all to do with regulating moisture. Until now, it’s not been
Once upon a time, dinosaurs were a pretty ubiquitous lot. Even 66 million years after the last dinosaurs went extinct, the fossils they left behind have been found on every continent on Earth. But bones don’t just fossilise anywhere – they’re most often found in sedimentary rocks. One particular area where there’s a distinct lack of dinosaur
For the first time, physicists have recorded sound waves moving through a perfect fluid with the lowest possible viscosity, as permitted by the laws of quantum mechanics, an ascending glissando of the frequencies at which the fluid resonates. This research can help us to understand some of the most extreme conditions in the Universe –
Seeing what the heck is going on inside of us is useful for many aspects of modern medicine. But how to do this without slicing and dicing through barriers like flesh and bone to observe living intact tissues, like our brains, is a tricky thing to do. Thick, inconsistent structures like bone will scatter light
This year is on course to be one of the three warmest ever recorded, the United Nations said Wednesday, as the UN chief warned the world was on the brink of “climate catastrophe”. The past six years, 2015 to 2020, are set to make up all six of the hottest years since modern records began
The dark web has a shady reputation. Hidden below the transparency and visibility of the internet’s surface, the complex anonymity networks that make up the dark web host and distribute all kinds of murky content: illicit drugs, child abuse material, illegal weapons, extremist paraphernalia, and more. But the dark web is also a misunderstood place,
Wherever you have fluid, there you can also find vortex rings. Now, scientists have found vortex rings somewhere fascinating – inside a tiny pillar made of a magnetic material, the gadolinium-cobalt intermetallic compound GdCo2. If you’ve seen smoke rings, or bubble rings under water, you’ve seen vortex rings: doughnut-shaped vortices that form when fluid flows back on
A long-standing and incredibly complex scientific problem concerning the structure and behaviour of proteins has been effectively solved by a new artificial intelligence (AI) system, scientists report. DeepMind, the UK-based AI company, has wowed us for years with its parade of ever-advancing neural networks that continually trounce humans at complex games such as chess and