After more than two years of analysis, the oldest complete ice core has served up a reliable snapshot of our planet’s atmosphere from nearly 2 million years ago. And the results are not what many expected. We know that roughly 1 million years ago, the cycle of Earth’s ice ages suddenly shifted, with deeper
Month: October 2019
Researchers at Sheffield Hallam University have uncovered the scratchings believed to scare-away evil spirits, inside a cavern at Creswell Crags Museum and Heritage Centre. The team using advanced technology and 3D have for the first time been able to give detailed images of the markings – thought to be the largest number recorded in the
To this day, the Khmer Empire is remembered for its magnificent capital Angkor, but the legendary Southeast Asian empire moved its seat of power around quite a bit, sometimes with uncertain results. The ancient city of Koh Ker had a very brief spell as the capital and centre between 928-944 CE, and now archaeologists think they have
The Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil’s Triangle, is a loosely defined region in the North Atlantic Ocean, where a number of aircraft and ships have disappeared. The vicinity of this so-called triangle is among the most heavily travelled shipping lanes in the world, with vessels frequently crossing through it for ports in the Americas, Europe and the Caribbean islands. Popular culture has attributed various
When we think about the formation of the entire freaking Universe, one of the biggest questions concerns the birth of the very first stars. It’s thought that stars began appearing in the first 100 million years after the Big Bang, and we’ve seen some really old stars; but the processes that created them from the
What started as a meme is now an international movement toward reforestation. When the YouTube star Jimmy Donaldson - aka MrBeast - hit 20 million subscribers on YouTube in May, a fan suggested there was something he could do to commemorate the milestone and “single handedly save Earth” at the same time. “Petition for
The Kincade Fire has been spreading through California wine country for a week, fuelled by powerful winds as it devours dry vegetation. Diablo winds (northern California’s version of the Santa Ana winds, though some people refer to both by the same name) have enabled the flames to tear through an estimated 76,825 acres (31,000 hectares)
When bitten on the finger by a venomous snake, a farmer in China took the only recourse he thought available to him: he lopped the digit right off before undertaking a journey to the nearest city with a hospital. But, according to the doctors who treated the patient once he arrived, he needn’t have
Have you ever wondered how long it would take for the entire world to become vampires? Let say we started out with the set-up from your favourite vampire novel: Do Bram Stoker’s Dracula vampires take over the world faster than vampires in True Blood or those in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles? Dominik Czernia, a physicist
What goes on in our minds is usually a private affair, but sometimes, our eyes can betray our thoughts. When someone is thinking of a bright image, their pupils will noticeably shrink, researchers have found, even if there’s nothing to look at and they weren’t anticipating light. The finding builds on previous research that
Evangelist John Ramirez who claims to have performed witchcraft for a quarter of a century, hit out at people for getting involved in the Halloween spirit on October 31. The US-born preacher said he sold his soul to the devil and reached the “highest rank of devil worshippers”. Mr Ramirez described how he was recruited
American cable news channel, HLN, reported on a scary sighting that became a viral sensation. Maritza Cibuls, a mother from the state of Illinois, posted a terrifying image of her son, Lincoln, with what appeared to be the ghostly outline of another child next to him. Mrs Cibuls stayed up all night staring at her
Saint Malachy was the Archbishop of Armagh, to whom several miracles were attributed to in the 12th-century. In 1139, Malachy went to Rome from Ireland to give an account of his affairs, when he reportedly received a strange vision about the future, including the names of 112 future popes. His prediction for the 112th and current
Video games were invented for humans, by humans. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re the best when it comes to playing them. In a new achievement that signifies just how far artificial intelligence (AI) has progressed, scientists have developed a learning algorithm that rose to the very top echelon of the esports powerhouse StarCraft II,
NASA scientists have found an exoplanet located somewhere no exoplanet should be able to survive. The space agency’s exoplanet-hunting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has found some pretty neat things in its time on the job so far, including exocomets, a rocky exoplanet with three Suns, and a black hole devouring a star. This new
Putting your pregnancy on pause until the time is right to give birth sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel, but for many mammals what’s known as “embryonic diapause” is an essential part of raising their young. Although scientists have known since the 1850s that some animals have this ability, it is only
On one day in September, people from over 50 countries decided to do something about our plastic problem. Together, they picked up almost half a million pieces of plastic garbage littering the planet. Over 40 percent of this mountain of trash was still clearly identifiable by brand, and one producer’s trash in particular was picked
Just like us, plants need water to survive, but that doesn’t mean these leafy greens enjoy a downpour any more than we do. When the grey clouds loom and the rain begins to fall, their response is immediate, all-consuming and close to that of ‘panic’, a surprising discovery reveals. Strange as that might seem
Available evidence points to there being a lot of water out there in the Universe, beyond the Solar System. Detecting it and studying it, however, is not exactly easy – unless the water comes to us. Now, some of it has, carried in on a comet from light-years away. According to a new analysis of
Say we stopped emitting greenhouse gases overnight; by the year 2100, the world’s oceans would still likely rise another foot and a half. More realistically, we’ll likely see seas get 2 or 3 feet higher. The projected flooding from that sea-level rise threatens hundreds of millions of people and vast amounts of infrastructure along
Where there’s water, there’s life, the thinking loosely goes. New evidence suggests starkly otherwise – or at least identifies some harsh new parameters on where life and water may (or may not) be able to co-exist. To find these limits, scientists travelled to one of the most extreme and inhospitable environments on Earth: the
A team of scientists from the universities of Alberta and Toronto have laid out the blueprints for a “quantum battery” that never loses its charge. To be clear, this battery doesn’t exist yet — but if they figure out how to build it, it could be a revolutionary breakthrough in energy storage. “The batteries
It’s not easy studying birds. They fly away for months at a time, and even if you can track them down again, their frivolous texting habits threaten to leave you utterly penniless. That’s what happened to a team of Russian scientists in Siberia, whose research budget blew out when the migrating eagles they were
This is sad news. After finding what seemed like a solution to the Mole’s difficulties on Mars, engineers are stymied again. The Mole, or Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) has bounced half-way out of its hole. It’s like Groundhog Day on Mars. If the Mole bounces out of its hole, it means
More than half a century ago, on July 1969, NASA completed the seemingly impossible Apollo 11 mission to put the first two men – Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin – on the Moon. Armstrong made history, jumping off the lunar lander Eagle and delivering his legendary “one small step” speech to the millions of anxious people watching
As an astronomer, there is no better feeling than achieving “first light” with a new instrument or telescope. It is the culmination of years of preparations and construction of new hardware, which for the first time collects light particles from an astronomical object. This is usually followed by a sigh of relief and then
A parasitic fungus that infects the common housefly spreads its tiny white spores in a deeply unsettling yet admittedly impressive way. Flying its host to a high place, the hidden fungus turns the fly into an artillery of water cannons, spraying its surroundings with some of the fastest jets of liquid measured in the natural
Humans can see faces in pretty much anything. Two blobs and a smear on carpet. A few rocks on Mars. A power outlet, or a sink. This delightful quirk of perception is called pareidolia, and it even works on a galactic scale. You may be surprised to learn that the image above isn’t actually
A group of researchers say they have pinpointed the ancestral homeland of all humans alive today: modern-day Botswana. In a new study published in the journal Nature, scientists analysed mitochondrial DNA – genetic information that gets passed down the female line – from more than 1,200 people across myriad populations in Africa. By examining
The US Air Force’s top secret, unpiloted space plane X-37B has arrived safely back on Earth after 780 days in orbit, the longest time a craft like this has ever spent in space. Originally launched on 7 September 2017, the reusable vehicle landed once again on Sunday at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida,
The three-body problem, one of the most notoriously complex calculations in physics, may have met its match in artificial intelligence: a new neural network promises to find solutions up to 100 million times faster than existing techniques. First formulated by Sir Isaac Newton, the three-body problem involves calculating the movement of three gravitationally interacting
A new video shows the moment that California’s Kincade fire broke out Wednesday night, and quickly spread to a raging wildfire. The video was recorded by the ALERT wildfire system, a network of cameras organised by three universities, with funding from California utility companies, to help firefighters better respond to wildfires, according to the Los
The Arctic is melting at unprecedented rates: Greenland’s ice is disappearing six times faster than it was four decades ago. In August, the ice sheet lost 60 billion tons in just five days of summer thaw. Over the last four decades, we’ve lost 75 percent of the volume of Arctic ice. The current extent
To be officially counted as a dwarf planet, there are four requirements that a piece of rock in space has to meet, according to the International Astronomical Union. It has to be in orbit around the Sun; but not around a planet (so, not a moon); it can’t have cleared the neighbourhood of its orbit;
The atmosphere is fluid. This means it’s subject to fluid dynamics, such as circulation, currents, and, yes, gravity waves. The atmosphere is always in motion, so these phenomena happen all the time; but actually seeing them is another matter. Well, thanks to weather satellites, now you can take a mighty gawk at atmospheric gravity
The Universe is expanding much faster than scientists predicted, and nobody knows why. A team of researchers has confirmed this dilemma with data gathered using a new telescope technology that relies on shape-shifting mirrors. According to their study, which was published last month in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, precise measurements of
People sometimes forget that oceans contain a lot more than the water you see just beneath the surface. The depths below the ocean’s surface comprise a staggering 95 percent of the Earth’s living space, and much of it is unexplored by humans. To put into perspective just how deep the oceans go, Xkcd.com created the illustration below (click the
Could a tiny planet, with weak gravity, harbor life? A team of scientists from Harvard University say they’ve found the smallest possible mass a planet could be before its lack of gravitational forces would cause it to lose its atmosphere and any liquid water. They found that the smallest possible planet that could maintain
Empires can fall for all kinds of reasons – invasion, over-expansion, corruption, economic troubles, climate change – but new research suggests the Akkadian Empire may have been brought low by a more unusual cause: dust storms. Flourishing during the Bronze Age (from the 24th to the 22nd century BCE), the Akkadian Empire was based around
No humans live on Mullion Island off the coast of Cornwall in Britain. No humans are even allowed to set foot on the remote island without a permit. Mullion Island is a protected sanctuary for seabirds – and yet conservationists kept finding rubber bands there – in the thousands. Now, rangers think they have
The days of Sesame Street’s resident counting vampire are numbered. It turns out toddlers a little older than a year already have a good sense of simple accounting – they can tell apart quantities of hidden blocks after hearing them being counted. That doesn’t mean they can do your taxes, but it does suggest
It’s a lovely thought – a tunnel connecting two regions of space-time, a sort of cosmic shortcut. Such wormholes are mostly thought to belong in the realm of science fiction, since if one happened to actually form in our Universe, physics dictates it would be unstable and collapse immediately. But supposing they could and
Rigorous testing is at the heart of any successful space mission. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be a million miles away when it deploys its mission-critical sunshield, and if it doesn’t function as planned, that’s it. Game over. The Webb is the most advanced space telescope ever built. It’s an infrared telescope,
Hydrogen peroxide, water’s short-tempered sibling, has helped humans to fight infection since we discovered its antiseptic properties nearly two centuries ago. Unfortunately, it’s pretty unstable, making it tricky to transport where needed. Now, researchers have found a rather simple way to generate the chemical out of water, air, and electricity, and it could be
It’s hot in the Middle Eastern nation of Qatar. Like, really hot. On summer nights, temperatures rarely dip below 32 degrees Celsius (that’s 90 degrees Fahrenheit), and during the day they can soar upwards of 48 degrees Celsius (120 degrees Fahrenheit). In response, the nation has done something that sounds absurd: it’s started to
The singer previously released videos of “unidentified” objects as part of his To The Stars Academy (TTSA), which where acknowledged by the US Navy. TTSA have now signed a deal with the US Army to enhance exploration into extra terrestrial activity. A statement said: “TTSA’s technology solutions, which leverage developments in material science, space-time metric
Seared into the brain of paleontologist Tyler Lyson is the date he cracked open the skull: 10 September, 2016. Before that discovery, Lyson and his colleagues had struck out at Corral Bluffs, Colorado, a site worked by fossil hunters since the 1930s. As the hours passed at the end of the field season, with
Pumpkins are, first and foremost, a food. Right? Well, in the UK and the US, the vast majority of pumpkins actually end up in landfill – right after October 31. Of the nearly 2 billion pounds of pumpkin grown in the United States in 2014, an estimated 1.3 billion pounds were simply trashed instead of eaten or
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