Humans aren’t the only primate messing around with their state of mind for fun. Footage online appears to show gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans deliberately spinning themselves around to get dizzy with it. While few of these animals were filmed in the wild, the findings suggest our primate relatives may have a similar proclivity for
There’s a new group of people on Earth who believe they’re aliens. Star people, or starseeds, are individuals who believe they have come to Earth from other dimensions to help heal the planet and guide humanity into the “golden age” – a period of great happiness, prosperity, and achievement. It might sound a little crazy
Compared to Earth, the Moon doesn’t have much going on. Where our planet’s surface features an impressive mix of windswept plains, ice-carved ravines, and volcanic mountain peaks, the lunar surface has impact craters. Lots of impact craters. Earth’s satellite is pocked and scarred from being pummeled with space shrapnel over billions of years, without the
There was a critical point early in Earth’s history when chemical reactions among the mix of organic molecules began to be powered from within, forming something we might start to think of as biological. Just what this first metabolic reaction might have looked like remains an area of speculation. It had to have been simple
March 14 is celebrated as Pi Day because the date, when written as 3/14, matches the start of the decimal expansion 3.14159… the most famous mathematical constant. By itself, pi is simply a number, one among countless others between 3 and 4. What makes it famous is that it’s built into every circle you see
Walk through a maze of mirrors, you’ll soon come face to face with yourself. Your nose meets your nose, your fingertips touch at their phantom twins, stopped abruptly by a boundary of glass. Most of the time, a reflection needs no explanation. The collision of light with the mirror’s surface is almost intuitive, its rays
Venus may be one of the brightest and most beautiful objects in our night sky, but don’t be fooled. Our neighboring planet is deeply inhospitable to life as we know it – a toxic, scorching world on which humans will never be able to tread. In spite of the differences in habitability, though, Venus shares
The smoke from recent wildfires is threatening to slow and even reverse the recovery of Earth’s ozone layer – the same one that the world has worked so hard to heal since 1987. The ozone layer is a crucial part of the stratosphere that stops our planet from getting scorched by the Sun’s radiation. It’s
Advances in artificial intelligence are coming so hard and fast that a museum in San Francisco, the beating heart of the tech revolution, has imagined a memorial to the demise of humanity. “Sorry for killing most of humanity person with smile cap and mustache,” says a monitor welcoming a visitor to the “Misalignment Museum“, a
A mysterious exoplanet just 138 light-years from Earth could be in the process of transforming. An analysis of an exoplanet named HD-207496b reveals that the world, clocking in at 6.1 and 2.25 times the mass and radius of Earth, respectively, either has a gaseous atmosphere, a global ocean, or a mixture of both – and
An enormous carpet of seaweed stretching 5,000 miles (8,047 kilometers) is set to cause problems along the beaches of Florida and Mexico as scientists become increasingly concerned about the impacts of the algae. The “Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt” is a massive bloom of brown algae that stretches from the coast of West Africa to the
It’s the classic social faux pas. You’re in a happy clique, surrounded by all your friends – and one by one, you subsume them, absorbing them into yourself, until you’re all alone, a grotesque agglomeration alone in what was once a crowded environment. That seems to be what happened to a galaxy 9.2 billion years
Seen from space, regions of Mars around the south pole have a bizarre, pitted “Swiss cheese” appearance. These formations come from alternating massive deposits of CO2 ice and water ice, similar to different layers of a cake. For decades, planetary scientists wondered how this formation was possible, as it was long believed that this layering
According to the experts, a newly spotted asteroid called 2023 DW is one to keep an eye on. The rock, with a diameter of almost 50 meters (164 feet), has a chance of slamming into Earth on 14 February 2046. Admittedly that chance is currently rated as “very small” by NASA and around 1 in
A Lufthansa flight that had to land shortly after takeoff is just the latest example of extreme turbulence. Each year, pilots report an average of 5,500 encounters with severe or greater turbulence. And that number has increased in recent years, thanks to climate change. Several other events have occurred in 2023 alone. The pilot had
To take a picture, the best digital cameras on the market open their shutter for around around one four thousandths of a second. To snapshot atomic activity, you’d need a shutter that clicks a lot faster. Now scientists have come up with a way of achieving a shutter speed that’s a mere trillionth of a
The Greek historian Herodotus reported over 2,000 years ago on a misguided forbidden experiment in which two children were prevented from hearing human speech so that a king could discover the true, unlearned language of human beings. Scientists now know that human language requires social learning and interaction with other people, a property shared with
After 12 years of work, a huge team of researchers from the UK, US, and Germany have completed the largest and most complex brain map to date, describing every neural connection in the brain of a larval fruit fly. Though nowhere near the size and complexity of a human brain, it still covers a respectable
NASA fixes malfunctioning spacecraft the same way you fix your troublesome laptop When faced with a potentially mission-ending problem with NASA’s 15-year-old Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft, engineers performed a time-honored procedure to fix it: They turned it off and then turned it back on again. Success! IBEX is now fully operational again. Actually, they
We humans may no longer have tails, but perhaps we have more in common with our smaller primate relatives than we thought. An analysis of accidentally broken stones used by macaques to crack nuts shows that monkeys have inadvertently been fracturing chunks of rock startlingly similar to the intentionally-created tools found at the world’s earliest
In the Wasatch Mountains of the western US on the slopes above a spring-fed lake, there dwells a single giant organism that provides an entire ecosystem on which plants and animals have relied for thousands of years. Found in my home state of Utah, “Pando” is a 106-acre stand of quaking aspen clones. Although it
Plastic pollution in the world’s oceans has reached “unprecedented levels” over the past 15 years, a new study has found, calling for a legally binding international treaty to stop the harmful waste. Ocean plastic pollution is a persistent problem around the globe – animals may become entangled in larger pieces of plastic like fishing nets,
Right now, your brain is keeping track of the passage of time without your awareness, letting you focus on better things like reading this story. This happens automatically, but not consistently. The brain’s perception of time can fluctuate, with some moments seeming to stretch or shrink relative to each objective second. While these wrinkles in
A purported exoplanet orbiting a star in the constellation of Eridanus associated with Star Trek‘s fictional Vulcan homeworld may have just been a figment in the star’s spectrum – a spectral specter. Analysis of the discovery data on several exoplanets across the galaxy has revealed that several detections were actually false positives: light fluctuations emitted
The cloudy material that drifts from chimney-like vents in the ocean floor could harbor microscopic lifeforms scientists never even knew existed. The ridges of the ocean seabed are littered with fissures called hydrothermal vents that spew hot, deep-Earth fluids containing hydrogen sulfides, methane, and hydrogen out into the ocean. Around the warm periphery of these
We’ve got a curious case of mistaken identity to report. Fossils previously believed to have been left by prehistoric tentacle-bearing aquatic invertebrates called Bryozoans may in fact have been created by a different source: seaweed. That’s the conclusion of a new study of the 500 million-year-old remains, which took a fresh look at Protomelission gateshousei
In 2022, the physics Nobel prize was awarded for experimental work showing that the quantum world must break some of our fundamental intuitions about how the Universe works. Many look at those experiments and conclude that they challenge “locality” – the intuition that distant objects need a physical mediator to interact. And indeed, a mysterious
On July 21, 1969, Neil Armstrong took that first fateful step onto the Moon. The exact moment occurred just as our planet’s standard universal time hit 2.56 am. But what time was it for Neil? There’s currently no answer to that question, but with plans in place to inhabit the Moon, that may need to
Alcohol distilled from the heart of the agave succulent is often packaged with what many people would consider an icky curiosity. Floating within some mezcal bottles is a worm-like baby insect. Since its addition to the traditional Mexican drink in around the 1940s, the taxonomic identity of the alcoholic-soaked grub we dare not consume has
Few discoveries in science would revolutionize technology as much as a material that achieves superconductivity at room temperature, under relatively mild pressures. A team of physicists led by Ranga Dias, a physicist from the University of Rochester in New York now claims they might have cracked it, demonstrating a rare earth metal called lutetium combined
From cake mixes and candy to cereal and ice cream, artificial flavorings like vanilla, strawberry, and raspberry can be found in a wide range of processed foods. The FDA doesn’t require listing all the ingredients in these additives, which leaves a lot open to interpretation and misunderstanding. For example, in recent years, a claim began
It may sound surprising, but when times are tough and there is no other food available, some soil bacteria can consume traces of hydrogen in the air as an energy source. In fact, bacteria remove a staggering 70 million tonnes of hydrogen yearly from the atmosphere, a process that literally shapes the composition of the
A star 1,300 light-years from Earth might have just revealed one of the Solar System’s best-kept secrets. It’s called V883 Orionis, a young star surrounded by a huge disk of material that will one day coalesce into orbiting planets. It’s in that disk that scientists have made an unambiguous detection of water vapor, swirling around
More than 47 million years ago, giant carnivorous ants swarmed the prehistoric forest floors of North America looking for prey. ‘Giant’ is no exaggeration either. Some ancient colonies that lived in what is now the state of Wyoming were ruled by queens the size of hummingbirds. Those aren’t even the biggest ants to ever stride
As our catalog of planetary systems in the Milky Way grows, it becomes increasingly clear how very different our Solar System could have been. In fact, of the nearly 4,000 planetary systems identified to date, none of them reflect the order and arrangement of planets orbiting our own Sun. That could be because Solar System
A Japanese company has put out the call for passengers who’d be willing to pay more than US$175,000 for an hours-long ride in a balloon-borne capsule that will rise as high as 15 miles (25 kilometers). Technically, that’s nowhere near the boundary of outer space, but it’s high enough to get an astronaut’s-eye view of
Which hand you prefer to write, eat, and brush your teeth with shouldn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. Yet scientists have been studying human handedness for over a century and discovered it can show a lot about how human brains can work differently. And since creativity is a measure of how we
NASA’s Curiosity rover snapped the first clear picture of Sun rays on Mars, which looks like a ghostly white-tinged sunset. The rover took the ethereal photo on February 2, as the Sun set behind a group of twilight clouds. These clouds hang at an unusually high altitude, which suggests they are probably made of carbon
Space probes designed to study the Sun are the last places you’d expect to have a moisture problem. Yet a recent investigation has found aluminum filters on two different satellites are degrading as water corrodes their surfaces. The filters help detect extreme ultraviolet (EUV) emissions, so any kind of clouding is bound to affect their
Japan could soon add more than 7,000 islands to its official list of land masses, more than doubling the number found in a tally conducted in 1987. It may sound absurd to have overlooked so many hulking chunks of land in previous counts, but with 370,000 square kilometers (140,000 square miles) of territory making up
Japanese authorities are preparing to release treated radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean, nearly 12 years after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. This will relieve pressure on more than 1,000 storage tanks, creating much-needed space for other vital remediation works. But the plan has attracted controversy. At first glance, releasing radioactive water into the ocean does
A peculiarly gruesome artifact has been uncovered during archaeological digs in England, hearkening back to long lost cultural practices that today we can only try to imagine. Several years ago, near a village just a few kilometers north-west of Cambridge called Bar Hill, archaeologists from the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) dug up a comb
Make a note of the newly discovered comet with the lengthy name of C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS): as it gets closer to the Sun and our planet, it could shine brighter in Earth’s night sky than many stars. The comet’s nearest approach to the Sun, or perihelion, won’t be until September 28, 2024, before hitting its
Are you scared of clowns? You are not alone. Coulrophobia, or the fear of clowns, is a widely acknowledged phenomenon. Studies indicate this fear is present among both adults and children in many different cultures. Yet it is not well understood due to a lack of focused research. While numerous possible explanations of the phobia
The bright, white tail feathers of the otherwise inconspicuous Eurasian woodcock (Scolopax rusticola) are the most reflective on record. An international team of researchers found that the woodcock’s white patches reflected up to 55 percent of light, making their feathers around 30 percent more reflective than any other bird previously measured. Woodcocks are mottled brown
Is our Universe all there is, or could there be more? Is our Universe just one of a countless multitude, all together in an all-encompassing multiverse? And if there are other universes, what would they be like? Could they be habitable? This might feel like speculation heaped upon speculation, but it’s not as crazy as
When it comes to finding life on other planets, a warm, wet world bubbling with a complex soup of chemicals might not be enough. It could pay to have the right kinds of planets in the neighborhood as well. An intriguing pair of gas giants has been found orbiting a star so similar to the
One of the most plastic-contaminated birds in the whole world is silently suffering from a novel, emerging disease scientists have coined ‘plasticosis’. It’s reportedly the first time researchers have ever documented and quantified the pathological effects of ingested plastic in wild animals, and it’s got scientists stressing about the health of more than just one