They are the hot-headed tyrants that drive the evolution of the cosmos. Black holes so large, so powerful, the energy spilled from their swirling cloaks can define the landscape of nurseries and graveyards of stars in the galaxy surrounding them. Even with masses equal to billions of suns, these gargantuan objects are still mere pinpricks in the
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Your friends are on average more popular than you are, according to a phenomenon known as the “friendship paradox.” Now, a group of mathematicians has come up with a new theory that takes the friendship paradox beyond averages, and they found that their equations describe real-world popularity differences among friends. Sociologist Scott Feld first explained
A thousand years ago, two Vikings died violently. One, on the Danish island of Funen, died in his 50s, likely from a stab wound to his hip. The other died in his 20s a world away in Oxford, England, his body riddled with wounds and thrown in a mass grave. It would not be the
There’s something strange near the galactic center. Some 25,000 light-years from Earth, astronomers have found a weird star that almost blinked out of existence for several months before reappearing. Astronomers believe the star, named VVV-WIT-08, could belong to a new class of star – giant beasts over 100 times the Sun that are eclipsed by
At the age of 16, when Tony Kofi was an apprentice builder living in Nottingham, he fell from the third story of a building. Time seemed to slow down massively, and he saw a complex series of images flash before his eyes. As he described it, “In my mind’s eye I saw many, many things:
Astronomy enthusiasts rose in the early-morning hours to capture a rare glimpse at a solar eclipse. Those in the northern US as well as Canada and Greenland got the best shots of the “ring of fire” eclipse that took place Thursday morning, though the eclipse was only partial for most of the Northern Hemisphere. A sliver
COVID-19 put a spotlight on personal health and safety like perhaps only a pandemic can, but there was one place at least where people didn’t get the memo: American roads. Despite Americans driving hundreds of billions of miles less in 2020 than they did in 2019, deadly traffic accidents actually surged in the year of
As if Australia’s wonderful menagerie of strange beasties wasn’t already unique enough – with biofluorescing mammals that lay eggs and sweat milk - the delightful weirdness extends even to their nether regions. Take an echidna’s junk, for instance. I mean, just look at that magnificent four-tipped monstrosity! “They have to be quite well endowed to get around
You’ve probably seen images of scientists peering down a microscope, looking at objects invisible to the naked eye. Indeed, microscopes are indispensable to our understanding of life. They are just as indispensable to biotechnology and medicine, for instance in our response to diseases such as COVID-19. However, the best light microscopes have hit a fundamental
The rain of meteorites from space onto our planet over the last 500 million years may not have fallen in quite the way we thought. After analyzing 8,484 kilograms (18,704 pounds) of sedimentary rock from ancient seabeds, scientists have found that major collisions in the asteroid belt have not made any significant contribution to the
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced plans on Monday to fly into space next month on a rocket built by his company Blue Origin, fulfilling what he said was a lifelong dream. The 57-year-old billionaire said he and his brother Mark will blast off from Earth on July 20 on the first crewed flight of the
The Moon will blot out part of the Sun during the “ring of fire” solar eclipse on Thursday (June 10) morning. But, no one should simply gaze upward at a solar eclipse (unless the Sun is completely covered by the Moon during totality, which is NOT happening this time). So, what’s a skygazer to do? Depending on where you
In just its first year of operations, a Canadian radio telescope has quadrupled the number of detections of strange cosmic signals known as extragalactic fast radio bursts. Between 2018 and 2019, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) detected 535 new signals. The new, expanded fast radio burst (FRB) catalog will allow scientists to better
Our incredible powers of learning are such a defining part of being human, yet we still don’t fully understand how our brains absorb new skills. Powerful modern imaging techniques, allowing us to look more closely at how memory consolidation works, have just highlighted the importance of wakeful rest in the learning process. Researchers have been
Grey, heavily cratered, and peering out from the black of space, Ganymede looks a lot like our moon. But the icy rock is more than 650 million kilometers (400 million miles) away – it’s the largest moon in the Solar System, and it circles Jupiter. NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been rocketing around Jupiter since 2016,
Despite slim hopes that global shutdowns during the pandemic might bring respite from the climate crisis, yet more evidence confirms that no such silver lining exists. Newly released measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in fact show that concentrations of the heat-trapping chemical have surged to record levels not seen by scientists in the
The largest shark ever to swim Earth’s oceans is like a ghost in the paleontological record. Megalodon (Otodus megalodon) is known primarily in the fossil record by its giant teeth, surviving millions of years, long after its cartilage skeleton decays to nothing. It’s from these giant teeth, as big as your hand, that scientists estimate
In December 2020, in the middle of a pandemic, I made the somewhat questionable decision to fly 11,200 km (7,000 miles) from where I live in Belfast, Northern Ireland to Santiago, Chile. Then, I boarded a connecting two-hour flight and drove for a further two hours, just to experience two minutes and 20 seconds of
Some 10 million years ago, the Paratethys Sea megalake – the largest lake in Earth’s history – covered an area greater than the size of today’s Mediterranean Sea. On a modern map, it would stretch from the Alps above Italy to Kazakhstan in central Asia. Until now, little has been known about the ebb and
Emotional intelligence, the ability to regulate and perceive emotions, is the subject of much debate amongst scientists and the public alike. Whilst most people agree that being able to read other people and control your own feelings are positive characteristics that vary in strength between individuals, objectively defining and measuring these abilities is not easy.
Constant chatter isn’t the best way to get your message across. Taking a breath before saying something important can make people listen more closely to what you have to say. And that’s not just a trick we humans have figured out. Frogs and birds have also been found to take purposeful pauses in their speech,
Squinting through their telescopes at the twinkling heavens, few 19th century astronomers would have imagined the cosmic wonders awaiting discovery in the century to come. Stars so dense, a teaspoon of their matter would weigh as much as a mountain. Objects so compact, literally nothing could escape its gravity. Even galaxies had yet to be
Seventeen decapitated skeletons dating back about 1,700 years have been discovered in three Roman cemeteries at Knobb’s Farm in Cambridgeshire, in the UK. Archaeologists who excavated the site think that the people were executed for violating Roman laws. However, scholars not affiliated with the research expressed mixed views about this explanation. The cemeteries hold the
One of the most breathtakingly beautiful sights our skies can muster is the dancing glow of auroral lights. Yet this fascinating phenomenon is still not fully understood. We know it’s produced by particles blown in from solar storms, accelerated along Earth’s magnetic field lines to the higher latitudes, where they rain down into the upper
For tens of thousands of years, a microscopic creature lay frozen and immobile underground in the Siberian permafrost. Yet, when scientists thawed it out, the tiny multicellular animal didn’t just revive – it reproduced, suggesting that there is a mechanism whereby multicellular animals can avoid cell damage during the freezing process and wake up ready
When we think of Antarctic exploration, the narrative is overwhelmingly white. The first confirmed sighting of mainland Antarctica was attributed to a Russian expedition in 1820, while the first landing on the mainland is attributed to an American explorer in 1821. Now, a new paper by New Zealander researchers suggests that the indigenous people of
NASA has selected two missions, dubbed DAVINCI+ and VERITAS, to study the “lost habitable” world of Venus. Each mission will receive approximately US$500 million for development and both are expected to launch between 2028 and 2030. It had long been thought there was no life on Venus, due to its extremely high temperatures. But late
The conclusion of a classified US intelligence report on the existence of alien UFOs is… inconclusive, US media reported Friday. US military and intelligence found no evidence that seemingly highly advanced unidentified flying objects sighted by military pilots were alien spacecraft, the report concludes, according to The New York Times and other media briefed on
With enough training, most humans can learn how to echolocate, using their tongue to make clicking sounds, and interpreting the sounds of the echoes that come back, reflected from the surrounding environment. In as few as 10 weeks, researchers were able to teach participants how to navigate obstacles and recognize the size and orientation of
Ancient, oscillating weather patterns similar to El Niño are chiefly responsible for environmental shifts in sub-Saharan Africa over the last 620,000 years, new research reveals – and they’re also likely to have played a big role in our evolution as a species. The emergence of Homo sapiens from Africa is well established, and the new
Coxcatlan Cave in Mexico’s Tehuacan Valley is a time capsule like no other. Its dusty floor is a history book, its pages detailing thousands of years of food and technology of the land’s inhabitants. Archaeologists from the US and Mexico have finally dug into its earliest chapter, using advanced dating techniques to determine the age
When seismic waves speed through the body of our planet, they appear to travel 3 percent faster when moving vertically from pole to pole, than horizontally from east to west. New models suggest this is because Earth’s solid core is growing faster on one side, deep beneath Indonesia’s Banda Sea, and slower on the other
The world’s oldest known water was found in an ancient pool below Canada in 2016, and is at least 2 billion years old. Back in 2013 scientists found water dating back about 1.5 billion years at the Kidd Mine in Ontario, but in 2016, deeper investigation revealed an even older source buried underground. The initial discovery
The United Nations is urging governments around the world to rewild a billion hectares of degraded land in the next ten years. That’s a slice of the environment roughly the size of China – the sum of what numerous countries have already pledged to restore. But while humans are really good at making commitments to
A new discovery could soon be raising the total number of confirmed magnetars to 25. On 3 June, a brief X-ray burst close to the galactic plane caught the attention of the Swift Burst Alert Telescope (BAT). Follow-up observation and analysis seem to confirm that it was emitted by a previously unknown magnetar, now named
The biggest natural disasters are by no means just a local issue, as new research shows: smoke from the devastating California wildfires of 2020 eventually reached as far as Europe, and was still dense enough after its travels to block out the Sun. Scientists tracked wildfire smoke originating from the US west coast in September
More than 19 million years ago, the world’s open oceans were absolutely teeming with sharks, roughly ten times more than today. Then, suddenly, these large marine predators almost all disappeared. This devastating and mysterious mass extinction event was only recently discovered through a series of accidental inquiries, and from the evidence we have so far,
Siberian jays are sneaky little rascals. These tiny corvids can use bird lies to try and trick other flocks into leaving a territory, so that the interlopers can move in and nick their food. But it seems that other Siberian jays (Perisoreus infaustus) are also wise to this ruse. New research has found that breeding
Earth’s oceans are full of life, with multitudes of creatures making their home beneath the waves. But not everywhere in the deep blue sea is receptive to life’s presence. In recent years, scientists have become increasingly concerned about ‘dead zones’: areas of hypoxic waters in the ocean where oxygen levels are so low, marine animals
China has achieved a new milestone in humanity’s experiments to harness the power of the stars. On Friday, the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ fusion machine reached 120 million degrees Celsius (216 million degrees Fahrenheit) and clung onto this for 101 seconds. The last time EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak or HT-7U) held onto a writhing
Being ready to interact with people is something puppies are born with, new research shows: Up to 40 percent of a young dog’s ability to communicate with us is genetic, even before any training or bonding has taken place. In other words, the friendliness that young pups are known for is partly innate – though
A huge cluster of stars has been found lurking in the Milky Way, just a relatively short cosmic distance from our own Solar System. Now around 75 million years old, the open cluster Valparaíso 1 is estimated to have contained around 10,000 solar masses’ worth of stars when it first blazed into existence. At just 7,000
Smashing together lead particles at 99.9999991 percent the speed of light, scientists have recreated the first matter that appeared after the Big Bang. Out of the wreck came a primordial type of matter known as quark-gluon plasma, or QGP. It only lasted a fraction of a second, but for the first time, scientists were able to
NASA announced two new missions to Venus on Wednesday that will launch at the end of the decade and are aimed at learning how Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor became a hellscape while our own thrived. “These two sister missions both aim to understand how Venus became an inferno-like world, capable of melting lead at the surface,”
Most people aren’t trying to share fake news, but that’s part of the problem: Nobody thinks it’s their fault. In a recent survey of 8,285 Americans, 90 percent of respondents thought they were better than the average person at spotting false news on social media. Obviously, a lot of people were mistaken. When asked to
For most life forms on Earth, oxygen is a necessity, not an optional extra – and because of our warming planet, oxygen is quickly disappearing from our freshwater lakes, putting aquatic life and ecosystems under threat. Researchers looked at samples and measurements taken from 393 lakes in temperate areas of the globe across a period
That delightful saying about men thinking with their nether regions has gained a new meaning. A new study has found an unnerving lot of similarities between men’s brains and the innards of their scrotums. “Brain and testis have the highest number of common proteins, compared with other human body tissues,” a team led by biomedical
A two-dimensional material with similar physical properties to graphene has now turned out to blow graphene out of the water in terms of toughness. The material is called hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN), and it’s so resistant to cracking that scientists are gobsmacked. The finding flies in the face of the fundamental description of fracture mechanics