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
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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
For a period of Earth’s history, between roughly 2.5 to 4 billion years ago, our planet was a punching bag for asteroids. During this time, Earth was absolutely pelted with large space rocks, compared to the relative quiet of our existence today. This activity would have produced significant alterations to the chemistry of the planet’s
New archaeological evidence has allowed scientists to refine the timeline for the Viking presence in North America. Pieces of wood scarred with cut marks have been precisely dated to the year 1021 CE – exactly 1,000 years ago – and the metal tools that made those marks were not produced by the indigenous population, according
The ancestral homeland of all modern domestic horses was likely located along the steppes of Western Eurasia around 4,200 years ago, according to new genetic research. Within just 1,000 years, the powerful and docile horses raised here, in what is now modern Russia, seem to have replaced all the other breeds in Europe and Asia.
The formation of a planetary system is a somewhat messy affair. After a star has finished forming, the swirling, roiling disk of material left over from the process starts to clump together, forming the seeds of planets. The complex gravitational environment is not a kind one, however, and these bodies jostle and collide as they
If you’re wondering just how much scientific consensus there is that humans have caused the climate of our planet to change, we can now put a number on it: 99.9 percent. That doesn’t leave much room for doubt. To get to that figure, researchers looked in detail at a total of 3,000 peer-reviewed studies randomly
Microplastics are turning up everywhere. We’ve found them in rivers, lakes, and oceans; in soil, snow and ice; in fish, whales, and us. In recent years, we’ve even started to measure these tiny particles in the very air we breathe. We still don’t know what, if anything, that’s doing to human health, but researchers in
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) sparked worldwide excitement in March as particle physicists reported tantalizing evidence for new physics – potentially a new force of nature. Now, our new result, yet to be peer reviewed, from CERN’s gargantuan particle collider seems to be adding further support to the idea. Our current best theory of particles
In attempts to understand the very nature of our reality, physicists sure have some mind-bending theories. Like what if information is a tangible and fundamental aspect of physical reality itself – alongside matter and energy? Or, alternatively, what if information is the fifth state of matter? Information is, after all, something all matter and energy
Fish swimming off the Carmel coast in western Israel may have been alarmed last Saturday to spot a scuba diver kicking through the water with a large, barnacle-encrusted sword in hand. The diver — a hobbyist named Shlomi Katzin — had just discovered a trove of 900-year-old artifacts on the Mediterranean Sea bed, apparently dating
The Arctic may no longer be the refuge it once was for migrating animals. Scientists now fear that climate change and environmental degradation have turned the yearly journey of numerous species, including birds, butterflies and ungulates, into an ecological trap. Upon reaching their destination, many animals are likely starving, being hunted or dying of disease
We design cities. We live in them. We work in them, and we have fun in them. But boy howdy are we bad at getting around them. According to mobile phone data from over 14,000 people living their daily lives, humans are terrible at calculating the shortest route through city streets. And the reason is
We know that true polar wander (TPW) can occasionally tilt whole planets and moons relative to their axes, but it’s not entirely clear just how often this has happened to Earth. Now a new study presents evidence of one such tilting event that occurred around 84 million years ago – when dinosaurs still walked the
Back when the Universe was young – around 13.7 billion years ago – the first stars formed in the soupy darkness, setting the cosmos alight. We’ve yet to find any of these very first stars, known as Population III stars – but a star found in a dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way may be
A grizzly bear attacked a photographer’s camera and ended up starring in a grisly photo that has won the photographer an award. Zack Clothier, a professional photographer based in Montana, set up a camera trap pointing at an elk carcass hoping to get some shots of scavenging wildlife. He returned to find his camera setup trashed and
Vivid green and purple auroras swirled and danced across the entire night sky in Sweden recently. The night-time light show was captured by an all-sky camera in Kiruna, Sweden, which is part of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Space Weather Service Network. This camera is pointed straight up, and is fitted with a fish-eye lens
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