Earth’s sloshing molten core could give us earthquake warnings 5 years ahead
Changes in the flow of iron around Earth’s outer core are thought to contribute to very small fluctuations in the length of our days. Now researchers say the sloshing of…
13 of this year’s creepiest science stories for your Halloween enjoyment
Happy Halloween! If you’re a regular reader, you know that science isn’t all quantum entanglement – sometimes it’s spooky action at a distance. For your delight, we’ve rounded up 13…
‘Twisted light’ could create ultra-fast wireless and make fibre optics obsolete
A new method of using photons to carry information might provide a new wireless solution for communication. A collaborative team of researchers developed a way to ‘twist’ photons to improve…
Here’s what makes female psychopaths a whole different kind of dangerous
Hear the word psychopath and most of us think of violent, dominant men. There are lots of male psychopathic monsters from movies to illustrate this point. Think Alex in A…
Carbon dioxide levels are the highest they’ve been in 3 million years
Earth’s concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) has hit a threshold not seen in at least 3 million years, after a record annual increase in 2016. In 2015, globally averaged…
A Biblical “Miracle” Could Be One of the First Documented Solar Eclipses
A puzzling passage from the Old Testament Book of Joshua could be one of the earliest solar eclipses we have on record – and it could help refine the dates…
Cave art has been discovered on an isolated, empty Caribbean island
Thousands of art pieces produced by a vanished civilisation have been uncovered on a Caribbean island, shining a light on a long-lost culture from the days before Europeans arrived. The…
Why climate scientists are obsessed with two mysterious boulders in the Bahamas
Atop a jagged, 50-foot-high (15-metre-high) cliff on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera sit two enormous boulders known as “The Cow and the Bull”. Each is several times taller than a…
Why we love to be scared, according to science
Fear may be as old as life on Earth. It is a fundamental, deeply wired reaction, evolved over the history of biology, to protect organisms against perceived threat to their…
This AI has learned to generate completely photorealistic human faces
Back in June, an image generator that could turn even the crudest doodle of a face into a more realistic looking image made the rounds online. That system used a…
A protein has been caught conducting electricity, and scientists are really excited
Proteins, the building blocks in every cell, have usually been thought of as blobs of inert organic matter. Now scientists have caught one particular protein doing something incredible: conducting electricity.…
Scientists are literally digging through bat poop to reconstruct historic climate records
From a sample of bat guano spanning across 1,200 years, researchers have uncovered an unprecedented climate record for a large swathe of the European continent. As their findings show, digging…
This new kind of AI can breach anti-bot security by thinking like a human
One of the most widespread security systems used on the internet to prevent non-humans from accessing websites has been defeated by a powerful new kind of artificial intelligence (AI). CAPTCHAs…
You must see what those recent insane solar flares looked like from space
We’re heading into a solar minimum, the period of the least sunspot activity in our Sun’s roughly 11-year cycle. But despite that, in September this year the Sun erupted into…
These spooky space sounds compiled by NASA will make your skin crawl
Just in time for the culmination of this year’s spooky season, NASA has debuted a playlist of sounds from space. And even though we know none of it is aliens,…