An astonishing 82 percent decrease in the cost of solar photovoltaic (PV) energy since 2010 has given the world a fighting chance to build a zero-emissions energy system which might be less costly than the fossil-fueled system it replaces. The International Energy Agency projects that PV solar generating capacity must grow ten-fold by 2040 if
Month: October 2021
Scientists have identified the traits that may make a person more likely to claim they hear the voices of the dead. According to research published earlier this year, a predisposition to high levels of absorption in tasks, unusual auditory experiences in childhood, and a high susceptibility to auditory hallucinations all occur more strongly in self-described
A new analysis of an ancient Egyptian mummy suggests that advanced mummification techniques were used 1,000 years earlier than previously believed, rewriting the understood history of ancient Egyptian funerary practices. The discovery centers around a mummy, known as Khuwy, believed to have been a high-ranking nobleman. He was excavated at the necropolis, a vast ancient burial
Venture close enough to a black hole and you’ll quickly learn how the force of gravity warps the very fabric of reality. Here on Earth, gravity’s time-bending effect is nowhere near as strong. It is, however, still measurable. What’s more, physicists have set a new record in describing our planet’s influence on the Universe’s ‘fabric’
Results from a recent study by US wildlife scientists found that two female California condors gave birth to chicks without any male genetic DNA, BBC reported. “This is truly an amazing discovery,” Oliver Ryder, director of conservation genetics at San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance (SDZWA) and a co-author of the study, said in a press release. “We only confirmed
Auroral activity on Earth varies over time. As the magnetic poles drift, auroras can appear at different latitudes around the globe. Solar activity also affects them, with powerful solar storms pushing the auroras further into mid-latitudes. In an effort to better understand how auroras move around, how they’ll move in the future, and when powerful
At first glance, the panda doesn’t seem to have the same sort of camouflage protection as, say, some lizards or many underwater creatures – but a new study demonstrates how the colors of the giant panda’s fur help it to blend into the background very effectively indeed. While this isn’t a completely new idea, it’s
Auroral fireworks for Halloween? It just might happen, depending on where you live. On October 28, 2021, the Sun blasted a “significant” X1 solar flare – the most intense class of flares. While the flare itself hit Earth eight and a half minutes later, an accompanying Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) was also released. The slower-moving
Even when there’s not a cloud in the sky, there’s always water circulating in the atmosphere. Compared to all the H20 on Earth, there isn’t much up there – only about 0.001 percent – but in areas of high humidity, even that small amount of moisture could be enough to provide safe drinking water for a billion
Shooting a drop of water with one of the world’s most powerful lasers might not be an obvious way to make an ice cube. But it is one way, at least if you want the kind of ice you might find deep inside planetary giants. Scientists have known about exotic forms of ice for decades,
Jupiter‘s iconic Great Red Spot may extend even deeper into the planet’s atmosphere than scientists thought. NASA’s Juno spacecraft zipped past the Great Red Spot – an anticyclone large enough to swallow Earth – twice in 2019. Measurements from those flights are now revealing the storm’s structure in far more detail than telescope images can show.
An unsuspecting worker at Galveston Island State Park on the western Gulf Coast in Texas found a fish with a surprise. Within the Atlantic croaker’s (Micropogonias undulatus) gaping mouth, where its tongue should have been, instead sat far too many legs for any mouth, or fish. These legs came with eyes, too. An isopod from
A man’s claim to be the great-grandson of Sitting Bull has been confirmed using DNA taken from the Native American leader’s scalp lock – billed as the first time genetic evidence has corroborated a family relationship between a historic figure and a living descendant. The breakthrough was made possible by a new technique that can
Scientists have named a new species that may have been the direct ancestor of modern humans. The newly proposed species, Homo bodoensis – which lived more than half a million years ago in Africa – may help to untangle how human lineages moved and interacted across the globe. Although modern humans, Homo sapiens, are the only surviving human lineage,
A thousand years ago, in what is now Peru, a middle-aged man was entombed amid a wealth of golden artifacts. His tightly scrunched-up body was turned upside-down, his head detached and placed close by. On his face was a delicate metal mask, with large decorative earrings and bulging beaded eyes. Both the mask and skeleton were
A talking CGI dinosaur just gave an impassioned speech about climate change to world leaders in a new UN video. Will they take it seriously? The dinosaur, named Frankie according to its Twitter page, bears a strong resemblance to the velociraptors from the film Jurassic World and is voiced by multiple celebrities in different languages, including film star and musician Jack
Even though we have not found any evidence of extraterrestrial life so far, that’s not to say we shouldn’t be prepared for the day when that could change. After all, many scientists think that alien life is a distinct possibility – if not an outright probability. While we are yet to turn up a whisper
There’s a vast amount of research out there, with the volume growing rapidly with each passing day. But there’s a problem. Not only is a lot of the existing literature hidden behind a paywall, but it can also be difficult to parse and make sense of in a comprehensive, logical way. What’s really needed is
There’s a a desert land in the very heart of Eurasia, dry enough to naturally mummify human remains. A Bronze Age discovery has now revealed the secret origins of the people who once called this region of China home. The Xiaohe people’s cattle-focused economy and difference in appearance have long posed questions about their origins.
Dune, the epic series of sci-fi books by Frank Herbert, now turned into a movie of the same name, is set in the far future on the desert planet of Arrakis. Herbert outlined a richly detailed world that, at first glance, seems so real we could imagine ourselves within it. However, if such a world
Stick a turtle’s beak on a baby hippo. Then twist its front legs so they stick out to either side, but keep its back legs straight. And give it tusks. Presto, you have something that looks a little bit like a prototype mammal-like animal that walked the planet hundreds of millions of years ago. These
Raging wildfires tore through Antarctica 75 million years ago, back when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, a new study finds. During the late Cretaceous period (100 million to 66 million years ago), one of the warmest periods on Earth, Antarctica’s James Ross Island was home to a temperate forest of conifers, ferns, and flowering plants known as angiosperms,
We’ve seen plenty of awe-inspiring images of space captured by telescopes and spacecraft in the past: whether it’s a supernova blast wave, the textures of a planet, or pillars of interstellar gas and dust, there’s a virtually endless stream of fascinating pictures available for us to pore over. Sometimes though there’s something more hidden in
You might know that the size of the pupils in our eyes changes depending on how well lit our environment is, but there’s more to the story: Scientists have now discovered that the pupil also shifts in size depending on how many objects we’re observing. The more objects in a scene, the bigger the pupil
Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere reached record levels last year, the United Nations said Monday, in a stark warning as Britain’s Boris Johnson admitted being “very worried” about the COP26 summit going awry. The UN’s blunt report on rising global warming comes as Prime Minister Johnson, the COP26 host, said it was “very, very
You can’t see them from the surface, but they’re definitely there. Scientists have revealed the discovery of hundreds of ancient ceremonial sites, many of which belonged to the Maya civilization, hiding in plain sight just underneath the landscape of modern-day southern Mexico. The largest of these structures – called Aguada Fénix – was announced by
In December last year, the media reported an intriguing signal we at the Breakthrough Listen project found in our radio telescope data. Dubbed BLC1, the signal didn’t appear to be the result of any recognizable astrophysical activity or any familiar Earth-based interference. The trouble was, we weren’t ready to discuss it. When you’re searching for
Experts have taken another look at 220-million-year-old footprints found in a coal mine in Ipswich, Australia in the 1960s – and concluded that they belong to a timid, long-necked herbivore rather than a bigger, raptor-like carnivore, as was originally thought. The updated assessment was made possible by a more detailed analysis of the original footprints
Human beings appear to have an almost innate sense of rhythm. Across cultures, we’ve fashioned different varieties of percussive instruments for use in an array of social contexts, while the body itself is also used as a drum, through hitting, stomping, dancing, and vocalizing. Our perception of rhythm appears to be closely related to our
In a galaxy 31 million light-years away, astronomers believe they have just found evidence of a planet. After a painstaking research effort combing through thousands of signals, a team led by Rosanne Di Stefano of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has determined that a huge dip in X-ray light from the Whirlpool Galaxy
An exquisite Christian prayer roll from five centuries ago has been rediscovered by researchers, giving the public its first glimpse at this little-seen religious medieval document, of a kind that rarely survives to the modern day in one piece. The prayer roll, an example of an illuminated manuscript – in reference to the rich decorations
Picture this: it’s April 2020, you’re between Zoom meetings, and scrolling through your social media newsfeed. Headlines like “Death toll continues to rise”, “COVID-19 may cause long-term health implications” and “Health-care systems overwhelmed” flash across your screen. Your mood takes a dive, but you can’t stop scrolling. If this scenario rings true for you, you’re
Just over 400 light-years away, a baby exoplanet is making its way into the Universe. This, in itself, is not so unusual. We’ve detected thousands of exoplanets – planets outside the Solar System. Presumably they all had to be newborn at some point too. What makes this exoplanet special is that astronomers obtained a direct image of
A “bomb cyclone” in the Pacific is dumping extreme rain and several feet of snow on California. The wild weather follows a summer of extreme drought and wildfires, and it could bring flooding, mudslides and debris flow to the parched and wildfire-scarred Golden State. The term “bomb cyclone” refers to the rapid intensification process –
Even when human societies do not grow crops, farm livestock, build permanent settlements, or burn fossil fuels, they can still shape the surrounding landscape in ways that persist for thousands of years. In Madagascar, a new satellite study has highlighted several ways in which small, highly mobile foragers may have altered the ecology of the
A series of new psychology studies has found most people want to tax all billionaires as a group, but think that, as individuals, they deserve to keep their hard-earned fortune. It’s a paradox that seems to say something about how we find it easier to relate to a solitary person than a group. The findings
Vaccines save lives, and have been doing so since the development of the smallpox vaccine more than 200 years ago. However, for vaccines to keep entire communities safe they need to be taken up by very large proportions of the population. Only then can the vaccinated offer protection to the unvaccinated, known as “herd immunity”.
A tiny crab scuttled around a forest floor, in the time of dinosaurs, minding its own business, when a blob of tree goop oozed onto it. Despite its struggles – during which it may have amputated its own leg in a futile attempt at escape – the sticky tree resin hardened around it, entombing it
If you’ve always wanted to discover a planet for your very own, now’s your chance. Researchers are calling on the public for help in identifying exoplanets – planets orbiting stars outside of our own Solar System. The Planet Hunters Next-Generation Transit Search (NGTS), run by an international group of astronomers, has five years’ worth of
Almost 20 years after researchers first predicted electron quadruplets, evidence of their existence has been shown to occur in experimental setups, representing a brand new state of matter that opens up a whole new field of possibilities in physics. Technically what we’re talking about here is fermionic quadrupling, referring to the type of particles involved
Your internal organs grow and change throughout your life, but rarely do they vanish without a trace. For baby octopuses, things are not so simple. Before they are born, embryonic octopuses sprout hundreds of temporary, microscopic structures known as Kölliker’s organs (KO). These tiny organs cover every surface of the octopus’s body, sometimes hiding inside little
In the 6 million years since our ancestors first branched off from our ancient primate relatives, the volume of the human brain has nearly quadrupled. What many people don’t realize, however, is that sometime after the last ice age, that very brain actually began to shrink. The result is that today, our brains are slightly
That’s what researchers concluded after analyzing rocks that China’s Chang’e-5 spacecraft gathered from the moon in late 2020 and delivered back to Earth. They’re the first lunar samples brought back since the Apollo missions in 1976. But they undermine the findings from analyses of those earlier samples. The Apollo rocks, along with some samples from
For the first time, physicists have been able to directly measure one of the ways exploding stars forge the heaviest elements in the Universe. By probing an accelerated beam of radioactive ions, a team led by physicist Gavin Lotay of the University of Surrey in the UK observed the proton-capture process thought to occur in
The mysteries to behold in the world’s vast oceans never cease to amaze us. Like this latest haul of deep-sea creatures with bulging torsos, spiky backbones, armor-like horns and eerily translucent bodies that are strangely beautiful – and perplexing. Reefed from the depths of the Gulf of Mexico, the critters are a collection of otherworldly
A ruby that formed in Earth’s crust 2.5 billion years ago encases evidence for early life, wriggling around in the planet’s mud. Trapped within the precious stone, geologists have identified residue of a form of pure carbon called graphite that, they say, is most likely biological in origin, the remains of some ancient microorganism from
A Jurassic graveyard in Patagonia, Argentina, holds more than 100 fossilized eggs and the bones of 80 Mussaurus patagonicus dinosaurs ranging in age from hatchling to adult. The trove of dinosaur remains suggests that these paleo-beasts lived in herds as early as 192 million years ago, a new study finds. The finding is the oldest evidence on
Shane Campbell-Staton, an evolutionary biologist at Princeton University, spent most of his career researching lizards. But at 3:00 am one morning in 2016, he was browsing YouTube and came across a video about African elephants. It described a bizarre trend: Many female elephants in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park lacked tusks. That was unusual, since usually just 2
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- Next Page »