Scientists have filled in millions of missing pieces of human DNA, yielding the most complete, gapless sequence of the human genome ever produced, bar one tiny chromosome. The feat, made possible by ever-improving genome sequencing technologies and a consortium of more than 100 scientists, sets a new benchmark for understanding human genetic diversity in all
Month: March 2022
Deep in the Earth beneath us lie two blobs the size of continents. One is under Africa, the other under the Pacific Ocean. The blobs have their roots 2,900 km (1,800 miles) below the surface, almost halfway to the centre of the Earth. They are thought to be the birthplace of rising columns of hot
Desert landscapes are not as lifeless as they look. Vast seas of sand dunes can not only grow, move, and interact with one another, a recent study suggests they can also ‘breathe’. Using a super-sensitive probe that took decades to invent, researchers have shown sand dunes regularly inhale and exhale tiny amounts of water vapor.
The Universe isn’t a chaotic free-for-all. Most of the stars are bound up in galaxies, which are separated by vast, almost unimaginable distances. The space between the galaxies – intergalactic space – is sparsely populated, but not entirely empty; there, too, occasional lone stars can also be found. For the first time, astronomers think they
The dazzling northern lights could light up the skies as far south as the northern United States after the detection of 17 solar eruptions blasting from a single sunspot, two of which are headed straight to Earth. The two Earth-directed eruptions have merged into a “cannibal coronal mass ejection” and are barreling toward us at 1,881,263
By any measure you want to use, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano eruption in January 2022 was a massive eruption. It produced a swirling plume of gas, dust and ash that reached 58 kilometers (36 miles) into the sky, atmospheric waves that traveled around the globe several times, and tsunamis in the Caribbean on the
It sounds like something out of a horror movie, but it happens more often than you might think in the insect world: viruses taking over their hosts and driving them towards death so that the virus might more easily spread to other victims. This has actually been going on for hundreds of millions of years
From billions of light-years across the vast gulf of space-time, from the very dawn of the Universe, astronomers have detected the light of a single star. Its discoverers have nicknamed it Earendel, from the Anglo-Saxon word meaning “morning star”; to date, it is the most distant object of its kind ever detected, dating to just
Our world is facing a huge challenge: we need to create enough high-quality, diverse and nutritious food to feed a growing population – and do so within the boundaries of our planet. This means significantly reducing the environmental impact of the global food system. There are more than 7,000 edible plant species which could be
The Milky Way is older than astronomers thought, or part of it is. A newly-published study shows that part of the disk is two billion years older than we thought. The region, called the thick disk, started forming only 0.8 billion years after the Big Bang. A pair of astronomers pieced together the Milky Way’s
Australia’s spectacular Great Barrier Reef is suffering “mass bleaching” as corals lose their color under the stress of warmer seas, authorities said Friday, in a blow widely blamed on climate change. The world’s largest coral reef system, stretching for more than 2,300 kilometers (1,400 miles) along the northeast coast of Australia, is showing the harmful
At the distant end of the Solar System, far from the Sun’s warmth and light, a truly unique world drifts in the alien darkness. Pluto, new research has found, has a landscape sculpted by ice volcanoes, of a type and scale seen nowhere else in the Solar System. To the south-west of the Sputnik Planitia,
Ancient, primordial helium that was forged in the wake of the Big Bang is leaking from Earth’s core, scientists report in a new study. There’s no cause for alarm. Earth isn’t deflating like a sad balloon. What it does mean is that Earth formed inside a solar nebula – the molecular cloud that gave birth
A new analysis of one of the most famous explosions in the cosmos has revealed a curious asymmetry. Part of the inner nebula of the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant is not, astronomers have found, expanding evenly. Something has caused a section of the cloud to move, not outwards with the rest of the material, but
When crazy ants roll into new parts of Texas, the invasive species wipe out local insects and lizards, drive away birds, and even blind baby rabbits by spewing acid in their eyes. Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin now have good news: A naturally occurring fungus-like pathogen can be used to reverse their
Mammals are some of the most well-researched animals on Earth, yet there are potentially hundreds of undescribed species still hiding in the wild, according to new predictive modeling. Machine learning suggests most of these unknown creatures are small-bodied, like bats, rodents, and shrews. Their size has probably made it difficult for experts to identify morphological
Part of weighing up any decision involves considering the consequences that are going to come of it, and scientists have now identified neurons in the brain that seem to encode the outcomes of actions so that they can be properly evaluated. The study was carried out in mice, but the researchers think it could broadly
A cell is not an island. Each one has a host of ways to detect its surroundings, and even physically reach out to neighbors or enemies using strange cellular appendages. These tentacle-like protrusions are called filopodia, and a new study has given us more insight into how they allow our cells to move about, by
Long before the Incas rose to power in Peru and began to celebrate their sun god, a little known civilization was building the earliest known astronomical observatory in the Americas. While not quite as old as sites like Stonehenge, these ancient ruins, known as Chankillo, are considered a “masterpiece of human creative genius“, holding unique
‘I saw it with my own eyes’ is something people often say. The implication is that since we perceived something, it must have happened. But what we perceive can be influenced by a great many things, and a strange new experiment shows just how easily our perceptions can be manipulated by our own expectations and assumptions.
A spacecraft that just skimmed the Sun has delivered the highest-resolution image yet of our home star’s full disk and atmosphere. On 7 March, the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter took the image with its Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) when it was at a distance of just 75 million kilometers (46.6 million miles) – half
Meet Eli. He entered the second year of his life with gusto and now, aged 18 months, he is discovering new things every day including ideas he wants to try out immediately. Like, right now. Waiting is not an option. Combined with his passion for life he often becomes emotionally overwhelmed and erupts into frequent
The study of a 30-million-year-old block of amber has revealed a lacewing fossil – not in the usual lacewing form, with large eyes and four long wings, but with grasping or raptorial legs that make it look much like a praying mantis. Unless you’re a lacewing expert, you might not know these insects have a
In the last 260 million years, dinosaurs came and went, Pangea split into the continents and islands we see today, and humans have quickly and irreversibly changed the world we live in. But through all of that, it seems Earth has been keeping time. A recent study of ancient geological events suggests that our planet
You’re driving slowly along a street, looking for a place to park. You come across a long stretch of parallel parking. But to your frustration, the spaces left by other people’s parking efforts are not quite long enough for you to fit. The search continues. Drawn from our own frustrating experiences with parking, we decided
In 2014, the Japanese Space Agency JAXA launched the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft to visit asteroid Ryugu. It arrived at the asteroid in June 2018 and studied it from orbit for over a year. Hayabusa 2 even dispatched four rovers to the asteroid’s surface. After departing, it flew past Earth in December 2020, dropping off a
In the past 24 hours, people uploaded more than 720,000 hours’ worth of footage onto YouTube. According to calculations made a few years ago by University of Portsmouth physicist Melvin Vopson, this literal mass of visual imagery – along with half a billion tweets, countless texts, billions of WhatsApp messages, and every other bit and
Powerful ambush hunters, Boa constrictor snakes are notorious for brutally incapacitating their prey – by squeezing them to death before swallowing them whole. Researchers have just discovered how the snakes achieve this without suffocating themselves. Contrary to popular belief, these nonvenomous reptiles actually kill their victims by choking off the blood flow to their heart
An Antarctic ice shelf larger than New York City – in an area previously thought to be stable – has collapsed. The shelf is relatively small, at 460 square miles, but its unexpected disintegration marks the first time in recorded history that East Antarctica has seen an ice shelf collapse, The Associated Press reported. “In this part
Astronomers have detected a cloud of dust the size of a whole star, 330 light-years away. Its cause? A colossal smash-up between two exoplanets that were still just forming. We know this because astronomers have analyzed the infrared glow of said dust cloud, along with changes in the light of the host star, periodically blotted
On a long-enough scale, our Sun is rather predictable. Roughly every 11 years, it goes through a cycle of high and low activity, the latter characterized by an uptick in sunspots, flares, and coronal mass ejections. On a cycle-to-cycle basis, it can be hard to predict how much activity our Sun is going to go
For the better part of four centuries, Greenland’s southern coast defined the westernmost edge of Viking occupation. Seduced by visions of verdant hills and fertile ground, in the late 10th century waves of Norse migrants set sail in hopes of an easier life abroad. At its peak, the colony’s population numbered in the thousands, spread
There was a time when our Universe was nothing but an opaque, lightless sea of swirling gas. By the time the Universe was a billion years old, however, that had all changed. Radiation from the first stars and galaxies wreaked a dramatic alteration, allowing light to stream freely, across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. A new
The glorious geological features of Yellowstone National Park in the US, powered by wells of hot water, are well known to the millions of visitors it attracts each year. What we know less about is the underlying ‘plumbing’ below the site. A new study reveals some of that hidden detail for the first time, charting
A new type of high-frequency acoustic wave discovered propagating on the Sun seems to be defying expectations. The waves appear on the surface of the Sun as a pattern of swirling vortices, moving against the Sun’s rotation. The problem is that these high-frequency retrograde vorticity waves seem to be moving three times faster than predicted
The United Nations said Wednesday it wanted the whole world covered by weather disaster early warning systems within five years to protect people from the worsening impacts of climate change. A third of the world’s people, mainly in the least-developed countries and developing small island states, are without early warning coverage, the UN said, with
One of the most famous archaeological sites in the world may be named after a simple misunderstanding. The ancient Incan city we know as ‘Machu Picchu’ should probably be called ‘Picchu’ or ‘Huayna Picchu’, according to a new analysis of historical documents. In 1911, when the White American historian and explorer, Hiram Bingham, was first
Scientists have confirmed the speed of sound on Mars, using equipment on the Perseverance rover to study the red planet’s atmosphere, which is very different to Earth’s. What they discovered could have some strange consequences for communication between future Martians. The findings suggest that trying to talk in Mars’ atmosphere might produce a weird effect,
Archaeologists in Scotland shed “genuine tears” upon discovering a stone covered with geometric carvings that the Picts, the Indigenous people of the region, designed about 1,500 years ago. The team unexpectedly found the 5.5-foot-long (1.7 meters) carved stone while doing a geophysical survey in Aberlemno, a village with Pictish roots. The stone has several geometric
The cutting-edge number-crunching capabilities of artificial intelligence mean that AI systems are able to spot diseases early, manage chemical reactions, and explain some of the mysteries of the Universe. But there’s a downside to this incredible and virtually limitless artificial brainpower. New research emphasizes how easily AI models can be trained for malicious purposes as
Rare-earth elements are crucial components in all kinds of electronics, from smartphones and broadband cables to wind turbines and electric cars. But coming up with useful compounds that can expand our practical use of rare-earths is notoriously difficult, with unpredictable results. Now, scientists have come up with a clever way to help the search of new
When a dog-sized Psittacosaurus was living out its days on Earth, it was probably concerned with mating, eating, and not being killed by other dinosaurs. It would never even have crossed its mind that, 120 million or so years later, scientists would be peering intensely up its clacker. However, that’s precisely what scientists did, publishing
Record-breaking heatwaves hit both Antarctica and the Arctic simultaneously this week, with temperatures reaching 47°C and 30°C higher than normal. Heatwaves are bizarre at any time in Antarctica, but particularly now at the equinox as Antarctica is about to descend into winter darkness. Likewise, up north, the Arctic is just emerging from winter. Are these
Amid the pandemic and other struggles that have affected most people on Earth in recent years, there are some bright spots of hope to be found – at least according to the new World Happiness Report 2022 just published by researchers and experts. The report is put together by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions
Fish communities on Australia’s famed Great Barrier Reef may become less colorful as oceans warm and corals bleach, according to a new Australian study that looked at changes in reef health, coral types, and resident fish over three decades. “Future reefs may not be the colorful ecosystems we recognize today,” write marine ecologist Chris
The Juno probe has been tasked with studying a leviathan: Jupiter, the heavyweight of the Solar System, King of the Planets. But a planet the size of Jupiter, nearly 318 times the mass of Earth, isn’t without its friends. The gas giant has 79 known moons (and possibly more unknown), one of them even bigger
When the dinosaur-destroying asteroid collided with Earth 66 million years ago, massive amounts of sulfur – volumes more than were previously thought – were thrown high above land into the stratosphere, a new study finds. Once airborne, this vast cloud of sulfur-bearing gases blocked the Sun and cooled Earth for decades to centuries, then fell
Spiders rely quite significantly on touch to sense the world around them. Their bodies and legs are covered in tiny hairs and slits that can distinguish between different kinds of vibrations. Prey blundering into a web makes a very different vibrational clamor from another spider coming a-wooing, or the stirring of a breeze, for example.
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