One was kickstarted by a school kid and her placard; another took flight after a hashtag went viral. Years later, these powerful social movements – demanding action on climate and racial justice – are in full swing, with millions of people raising their voices, fists, and hand-painted posters in support. While subsets of communities
Deep within, on a cellular scale, your body is in a constant state of activity to keep you alive. Among those processes is the turnover of cells, replacing the cells that die with fresh new ones so that you don’t crumble to bits like a zombie. A new calculation reveals just how intensive that
A robot inspired by the shape and delicate underwater movements of a jellyfish, allowing it to safely explore endangered coral reefs, was unveiled by British scientists on Wednesday. According to research by teams at the universities of Southampton and Edinburgh and published in the journal Science Robotics, the small robot mimics “nature’s most efficient
The amount of carbon dioxide that we can still emit while limiting global warming to a given target is called the “remaining carbon budget,” and it has become a powerful tool to inform climate policy goals and track progress towards net-zero emissions targets. This carbon budget is like a fixed financial budget: There is
Like pappy used to say: if you see it writhe and hiss, give it a miss. Humans have passed on similar nuggets of wisdom since time immemorial, giving us a healthy (and sometimes less than healthy) respect for backing away from snakes. Yet the fact snake bites hurt is usually an accident of nature
Conservationists have started using satellite imagery to count elephants from space, a technique that British experts hope will help protect threatened populations in Africa. Researchers at the University of Oxford and the University of Bath said the use of algorithms, machine learning, and satellite technology could replace current techniques used to count elephants –
The formation of crystals is one of the most commonplace processes you can probably think of. Every time you freeze water into ice cubes, for instance, you’re creating crystalline structures. There’s even a fun experiment you can do to grow salt crystals – with nothing more than table salt and water. But on the
Sharing a car with someone is one of the riskiest things you can do without cohabitating, as far as coronavirus transmission goes. While taking a car may feel like a slightly safer alternative compared to public transportation, it’s still a small, enclosed space. Even if all passengers are wearing masks, some small particles can escape from
To artists and romantics, the twinkling of stars is visual poetry; a dance of distant light as it twists and bends through a turbulent ocean of air above our heads. Not everybody is so enamoured with our atmosphere’s distortions. To many scientists and engineers, a great deal of research and ground-to-satellite communication would be a
Scientists have unearthed massive, 98-million-year-old fossils in southwest Argentina they say may have belonged to the largest dinosaur ever discovered. Human-sized pieces of fossilized bone belonging to the giant sauropod appear to be 10-20 percent larger than those attributed to Patagotitan mayorum, the biggest dinosaur ever identified, according to a statement Wednesday from the National
A new study suggests a potential change in tropical rain belt patterns could threaten the livelihoods and food security of billions of people. Today, the tropical rain belt brings with it heavy precipitation along the equator, but as different parts of Earth’s atmosphere heat up at different rates, this belt looks likely to become disrupted
Through a careful analysis of fossilised seafloor layers dating back some 20 million years, scientists have reconstructed the lair of a giant underwater worm that would most probably have lain hidden in sediment before leaping up to ambush its prey. The newly identified creature is likely to be an ancestor of the Eunice aphroditois
In 2013, the lives of millions of sea stars were mysteriously extinguished. Limbs that were once strong, probing arms searching for sustenance, shrivelled and tore themselves away from the rest of their bodies and melted into a sickly goo. “There were arms everywhere,” ecologist Drew Harvell told The Atlantic‘s Ed Yong last year. “It
From advertising to the workplace, it is often assumed that men and women are fundamentally different – from Mars and Venus, respectively. Of course, we all know people who are more androgynous, having a mix of personality traits that are stereotypically considered to be male or female. Importantly, such “psychological androgyny” has long been
A male Springbok praying mantis looking for a hook-up doesn’t have to worry about a female stealing his heart away. There is, however, a very good change she’ll bite his head off, and he knows it. Indeed, 60 percent of sexual encounters between Springboks – one of nearly 2,000 mantis species across the globe – end in males
New video shows the moment when Mount Etna, Europe’s largest active volcano, spewed bubbling lava and hot ash into the Sicilian sky earlier this week. On Sunday (Jan. 17), lava began “oozing” from the Etna’s southeast crater and toward the east, according to Boris Behncke, a volcanologist at the INGV-Osservatorio Etneo in Catania, Sicily, Express reported.
Bronze Age Europeans may have used rings and blades as an early form of currency, based on a study of objects from 113 different hoards of artefacts – and these objects might even have been standardised in terms of their weight and size to minimise the chances of getting ripped off. There’s no evidence
If you are a lucky species, you will stumble into random gene mutations that just happen to help you survive better – allowing you and your descendants to keep and build on the helpful traits they encode. As with anything involving luck, the more chances you take, the more chances you have of hitting the
Having survived for 5,000 years, the oldest archeological site in the Americas is under threat from squatters claiming the coronavirus pandemic has left them with no other option but to occupy the sacred city. The situation has become so bad that archeologist Ruth Shady, who discovered the Caral site in Peru, has been threatened
A funerary temple belonging to Queen Nearit has been discovered in the ancient Egyptian burial ground Saqqara next to the pyramid of her husband, pharaoh Teti, who ruled Egypt from around 2323 BCE to 2291 BCE, the Egyptian antiquities ministry said in a statement. Made of stone, the temple has three mud-brick warehouses on its
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 they have
Every day you walk around with your brain gently bobbing about inside your skull. Much like a soft egg yolk floating in a cloud of clear egg whites. All it takes is a sudden jolt or strike, and your brain is thrust aside with startling velocity. Whether it bumps against the skull or goes for
Striking new videos show how RNA – the genetic molecule that tells cells how to build proteins – tangles up in insane knots as it forms, only to disentangle itself at the last second, and in a way that took scientists by surprise. The high-resolution videos depict a bouncing conga line of nucleotides, the
A new technique using diamonds and titanium has the potential to help remove plastic microfibres before they enter the environment, by decomposing them into naturally occurring molecules. It’s a secret the fashion industry would prefer to keep under wraps – most of our synthetic clothes are made of plastic, and they’re contributing to a big problem,
Polarons are important nanoscale phenomena: a transient configuration between electrons and atoms (known as quasiparticles) that exist for only trillionths of a second. These configurations have unique characteristics that can help us understand some of the mysterious behaviours of the materials they form within – and scientists have just observed them for the first time.
It’s no accident that cats are adorable: We’ve selectively bred them across generations for maximum cuteness. But that breeding has a downside: It’s left some of our feline friends with permanent frowny faces that cannot show emotions. In particular, new research published in December in the journal Frontiers of Veterinary Science suggests that selective breeding for the “brachycephalic,”
Scientists have identified the traits that may make a person more likely to claim they hear the voices of the dead. According to new research, 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 clairaudient mediums than
Even though we know the deep sea is weird, ‘carnivorous sea sponges’ still sound like something from a sci-fi movie. And yet, researchers just announced the discovery of three new such species off the coast of Australia. Go a few hundred metres deep into the ocean, and it starts to look like you’re in a whole
NASA announced Thursday that 2020 was likely the planet’s hottest year on record, edging out 2016 by one-tenth of a degree Celsius. The temperatures were close enough to fall within the scientists’ margin of error, so they considered it “a statistical tie.” Average global temperatures in 2020 were 1.84 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius)
The end of the last ice age, around 12,000 years ago, was characterised by a final cold phase called the Younger Dryas. Scandinavia was still mostly covered in ice, and across Europe the mountains had many more, and larger, glaciers than today. There was a substantial icefield in the west of Scotland and glaciers could
Most people associate the word “coral” with sunshine, blue skies and Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. In fact, more than half of the 5,100 species on the planet exist as “cold-water corals” in deep and dark parts of the world’s oceans. Unlike most other animals, corals are immobile and so rely heavily on currents to
For most people, the word “vampire” brings to mind Dracula or perhaps slayers such as Blade or Buffy; or maybe even the vampire bats of South America. Few will think of a small and rather lovely bird – the finch. But there are indeed “vampire finches” that feast on the blood of much larger
Say a red gummy bear has a baby with a yellow gummy bear – what percentage of red and yellow do the parents give to their children? Well, assuming gummy bear genetics works the same way we do, they’ll have one set of chromosomes from their mum and one from their dad – so 50
A lonely rhinoceros at a Bangladesh zoo is looking for new love after losing her partner seven years ago, but pandemic travel restrictions are hampering her keeper’s attempts to play matchmaker. Kanchi, a star attraction at the Bangladesh National Zoo, is at her most fertile age. But since the death of her male partner
Underwater seagrass in coastal areas appear to trap bits of plastic in natural bundles of fibre known as ‘Neptune balls’, researchers said Thursday. With no help from humans, the swaying plants – anchored to shallow seabeds – may collect nearly 900 million plastic items in the Mediterranean alone every year, they reported in the journal
Apocalypse or revolution? Depending on the study making headlines, insect numbers around the world are either in dramatic freefall or simply an alarming state of flux, with some species even benefiting from changes in climate. While researchers debate the details, most are in agreement that our existing lifestyle is fundamentally linked with insect numbers,
Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity profoundly changed our thinking about fundamental concepts in physics, such as space and time. But it also left us with some deep mysteries. One was black holes, which were only unequivocally detected over the past few years. Another was “wormholes” – bridges connecting different points in spacetime, in
A desert gecko from Namibia has brilliant glow-in-the-dark markings that shine neon green by the light of the moon. The mechanism that produces its glow has never been seen before in land animals with backbones. Web-footed geckos (Pachydactylus rangei) have translucent skin with large, yellowish markings: stripes on their sides and rings surrounding their eyes.
Electric eels appear to not be the loners we thought they were. In a small lake deep in the Amazon River basin in Brazil, scientists have for the first time recorded the fish not just living together, but actively working together to forage, and to bring down their prey. There’s even evidence that the
We know that all the excess CO2 we’re pumping into the air – alongside a host of other damaging effects – is driving up the acidity of the oceans as it sinks and dissolves into the water, but it seems as though the hardy octopus can find ways to adapt to its rapidly changing environment.
Physicists have observed a new state of matter at work inside an elusive thread of quantum gas. The gossamer-thin strings of gas capable of binding giants sound items worthy of a quest in Grimm’s fairy tales. But versions of these materials are theoretically possible in physics – unfortunately though, in practice they inevitably collapse on
Forests and other land ecosystems today absorb 30 percent of humanity’s CO2 pollution, but rapid global warming could transform these natural ‘sinks’ into carbon ‘sources’ within a few decades, opening another daunting front in the fight against climate change, alarmed researchers have said. Climate skeptics often describe CO2 as “plant food”, suggesting that increased
For decades, scientists have wrestled with a complex mystery of physics: Could the immense amounts of energy theoretically produced by rotating black holes ever be tapped by human hands? If future societies were somehow able to pull off this magnificent feat, the power supply of far-off galactic civilisations would seemingly be assured – and
Curiosity affects everything from our relationships to our education, but it’s not easy to pin down and put under a microscope to study. With the help of Wikipedia though, researchers have now done just, exploring two main types of curiosity. Using Wikipedia browsing as an activity to observe, and a maths technique called graph
The emergency is not invisible. But that doesn’t mean we can see it. After decades of inaction and ineffective action on biodiversity decline, climate change, and pollution, civilisation stands on the precipice of a “ghastly future” it has gravely underestimated, an international team of scientific experts warns in an unnerving new study published this week.
The idea of artificial intelligence overthrowing humankind has been talked about for many decades, and scientists have just delivered their verdict on whether we’d be able to control a high-level computer super-intelligence. The answer? Almost definitely not. The catch is that controlling a super-intelligence far beyond human comprehension would require a simulation of that
The oldest-known animal drawing in the world is a 45,500-year-old depiction of a hairy, warty pig on a cave wall in Indonesia, a new study finds. The mulberry colored painting, drawn with the red mineral ochre, shows the profile of what is likely a Sulawesi warty pig (Sus celebensis), a wild stubby-legged beast with facial warts that can
The ancient, extinct dire wolf may have been among the lonest of the wolves – so genetically distinct from its closest wolf relative that it could no longer interbreed, forcing it into an evolutionary dead end when it died out 13,000 years ago. That’s the finding based on a new study, the in-depth analysis
- 1
- 2
- 3
- …
- 328
- Next Page »