Near the end of 2019, astronomers watching the red giant Betelgeuse noted how much the star had dimmed, continuing to steadily fade for months. It’s a variable star, and it’s known to get dimmer and brighter, but the big surprise is that it’s still continuing to dim, recently passing magnitude 1.56 and still getting dimmer.
Month: February 2020
Hundreds of thousands of mussels cooked to death in New Zealand due to rising temperatures in New Zealand’s oceans. New Zealand resident Brandon Ferguson posted a video on Facebook from Maunganui Bluff Beach, located on the country’s North Island, showing hundreds-of-thousands of dead mussels that had washed up on the shore. Ferguson told Business
There’s an old saying, “When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on.” In other words, before you give up, take matters into your own hands and try a little harder. As a psychology researcher, I believe this adage applies to relationships, too. Before you let go,
Solar panels are fantastic pieces of technology, but we need to work out how to make them even more efficient – and last year, scientists solved a 40-year-old mystery around one of the key obstacles to increased efficiency. The 2019 study outlined a material defect in silicon used to produce solar cells that has
NASA astronaut Christina Koch recently returned to Earth after 328 days in space, breaking the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman. She completed six spacewalks while on the International Space Station, including the first all-female spacewalk with astronaut Jessica Meir. When she finally made it home, her beloved pup, LBD (Little
The deadly disease has now claimed the lives of more than 1,300 people in China and is threatening to become a global pandemic, while conflict in Iran and the African locust invasion have the Middle East on high alert. But, Biblical scholar Melvin Sandelin, has urged viewers on his “Christian Life” YouTube channel not to fear, claiming it is
There are many things in the Universe we are yet to understand. It’s a big old machine just churning out mysteries, and we tiny specks crawling on the surface of a small blue dot are doing our darnedest to unravel them. Recently, news emerged about one of the most tantalising mysteries. For the first time,
A species of jellyfish hunts its prey by hurling venom grenades to create “stinging water”, researchers said Thursday, solving a long-standing mystery as to how they gather food without tentacles. The upside down jellyfish (Cassiopea xamachana), found in shallow waters around Florida, the Caribbean and Micronesia, is a frequent nuisance to snorkelers and surfers who
Since 2017, an iceberg the size of Las Vegas has been slowly cracking and breaking off the massive Pine Island Glacier, on the coast of Antarctica. The European Space Agency (ESA) has kept satellite cameras trained on the iceberg – dubbed PIG – since then, Inverse reports, and now the space agency released a time-lapse
Scientists in Antarctica have recorded a new record temperature of 20.75 degrees Celsius (69.35 Fahrenheit), breaking the barrier of 20 degrees for the first time on the continent, a researcher said Thursday. “We’d never seen a temperature this high in Antarctica,” Brazilian scientist Carlos Schaefer told AFP. He cautioned that the reading, taken at
Two stunned hikers in eastern Ohio may have spotted the creature, capturing the strange sight on camera. The two men claim to have spotted the yeti in Salt Fork State Park. The video of the Sasquatch has since gone viral. One of the men wrote in a post with the accompanying video that they got
In the far reaches of the Solar System, a small rock is showing us how giant planets get their start. Arrokoth – the most distant and most primordial world ever visited by a human spacecraft – now spills its secrets in three new papers. Those findings could resolve some debate about how planetesimals –
Footage of unusual activity in US airspace has emerged online. And prominent alien life advocate Scott Waring believes the strange lights are likely to be a small fleet of alien UFOs. Waring, who shared the bizarre footage on his etdatabase.com blog, said: “I’m calling it a UFO fleet.” He said: “This UFO fleet was recorded
In a world affected by climate change, every little tweak we make counts. While we’re still sorting out jet fuel, there’s another plane travel impact we could cut back on rather easily, according to a new study. Getting planes to fly just 2,000 feet (610 metres) lower could cut the climate impact of the
Sifting through a soup of genes sampled from many environments, including human saliva, animal poop, lakes, hospitals, soils and more, researchers have found hundreds of giant viruses – some with abilities only seen before in cellular life. The international team, led by scientists from University of California, Berkeley, has discovered entire new groups of
The light of a dying star is so intense it can reduce asteroids to dust. A new study indicates this will happen to most of the stars currently burning in the Universe, including the Sun, which will shatter its asteroid belt down to boulders in about 5 to 6 billion years. The sole agent
On 14 February 1990, the Voyager 1 space probe shut down its cameras for the rest of eternity. A mere half hour before that, it recorded one final image. Humanity now knows that picture as the Pale Blue Dot. Suspended in a beam of sunlight, Earth is a mere speck of blue set against the
Many tales surrounding the myth of the Loch Ness Monster point to a giant reptile leftover from the Jurassic era or a dragon-like creature. The monster was first spotted in the River Ness in 565 AD, with sightings since then keeping the myth alive. The most famous image that exists today of the alleged beast
The mystery of Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, is often told as a “parable of self-destruction“, a cautionary tale of human exploitation and ‘ecocide’. When the last tree falls, so does humanity – or so the story goes. It’s a narrative that’s been repeated many times and is often treated as fact, but in
Scientists have managed to get two quantum memories entangled over 50 kilometres (31 miles) of fibre optic cables, almost 40 times the previous record. This achievement makes the idea of a super-fast, super-secure quantum internet a much more plausible one. Quantum communication relies on quantum entanglement, or what Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance’:
A man who gave his name as just Brom said when he was younger, he was involved in a swimming injury which resulted in having to have a trachea tube fitted. However, as doctors and nurses were attempting to move Brom, the trachea tube became dislodged. This meant he was unable to breathe, and at
The shaky amateur 25 second-long footage of unknown origin distinctly shows disk-shaped white object appearing to hover motionless over the barren US desert. The camera phone footage is purported to have been shot in late January 2020. This video is an awesome capture of an actual alien craft in the Nevada area Scott Waring Controversial
It lived in a place we now call Alberta, Canada, but this was in an ancient time, long before any names existed. It was a young hadrosaur, a giant ‘duck-billed’ herbivore, and something was wrong with it. We don’t know what killed this dinosaur, but at some point, it swished its long, heavy tail for
Scientists said Monday they had discovered a new species of dinosaur closely related to Tyrannosaurus rex that strode the plain of North America some 80 million years ago. Thanatotheristes degrootorum – Greek for “Reaper of Death” – is thought to be the oldest member of the T. rex family yet discovered in northern North America,
Wanted: The next generation of astronauts to walk on the Moon and journey to Mars. You’ll need a relevant Master’s degree, be prepared to live and work 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth on the International Space Station, and be a US citizen. NASA announced Tuesday it was seeking to boost its astronaut corps,
In the latest viral challenge to overtake Twitter, people are balancing brooms upright in order to demonstrate a supposed unique gravitational pull taking place on February 10. However, the tweet igniting the #BroomChallenge – which claimed that NASA provided the scientific basis for the balancing act – has proven to be a hoax. “Okay
The gene pool of modern West Africans contains the ‘ghost’ of a mysterious hominin, unlike any we’ve detected so far. Similar to how humans and Neanderthals once mated, new research suggests this ancient long-lost species may have once mingled with our ancestors on the African continent. Using whole-genome data from present-day West Africans, scientists
Ebola. SARS. Rabies. MERS. Most probably even the flourishing new coronavirus, COVID-19. There’s one animal that innocently and unwittingly gifts all these virulent scourges to humanity. Bats. Why is that? According to new research, it’s because bats may be the ultimate incubator, courtesy of a fiercely effective and robust immune system that seems to,
If the worst ever happens, there’s a special place on Earth from which plant life might just have the best chance to spring anew. That place is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Often dubbed the ‘Doomsday Vault’, this fortress-like bunker in Norway stores almost a million samples of food crop seeds, in case of future crises
A large asteroid whooshed past Earth last week, and mooned all of humanity in the process. As it approached Earth space, asteroid 2020 BX12 was under close observation. Clocking in at 200 to 450 metres across (656 to 1,476 feet), and moving at around 90,000 kilometres per hour (56,000 miles per hour), the space rock
Last year, the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors pinged with an entirely new kind of collision: not two neutron stars, not two black holes, but a neutron star and a black hole together. Scientists were thrilled: this could be the first time we’ve ever witnessed such a binary system. Now, after poring over
The conspiracy theories were also dismissed by Dr Andrzejem Horban, an infectious disease expert from the Provincial Infectious Hospital in Warsaw, Poland. He said: “The virus does not meet the criteria of a biological weapon. A virus used as a bioweapon should kill between 20 and 30 percent of those infected.” The coronavirus has a
Have you ever used a public charging station to charge your mobile phone when it runs out of battery? If so, watch out for “juice jacking”. Cybercriminals are on the prowl to infect your mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers and access your personal data, or install malware while you charge them.
Newly created artificial atoms on a silicon chip could become the new basis for quantum computing. Engineers in Australia have found a way to make these artificial atoms more stable, which in turn could produce more consistent quantum bits, or qubits – the basic units of information in a quantum system. The research builds
Russian spacecraft are trailing a US satellite used to spy on other countries, according to the commander of the US Space Force. “This is unusual and disturbing behaviour and has the potential to create a dangerous situation in space,” General John Raymond, the Space Force chief of space operations, said in a statement to Business
Half of the 1 million animal and plant species on Earth facing extinction are insects, and their disappearance could be catastrophic for humankind, scientists have said in a “warning to humanity”. “The current insect extinction crisis is deeply worrying,” said Pedro Cardoso, a biologist at the Finnish Museum of Natural History and lead author
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing on March 8, 2014, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board. The official investigation concluded that, after the plane did a 180 and flew up the Malacca Strait, it then turned and flew south over the Indian Ocean and ended up in the sea
Four thousand years ago, the last woolly mammoths quietly died on their final bastion – the isolated Wrangel Island, north of Russia in the frozen Arctic. Their demise was sudden, and strange; now, new evidence points to the mammoths themselves as partial agents of their own demise. Specifically, the mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) were afflicted by
Scientists have identified an enigmatic virus whose genome seems to be almost entirely new to science, populated by unfamiliar genes that have never before been documented in viral research. The so-called Yaravirus, named after Yara – or Iara, a water-queen figure in Brazilian mythology – was recovered from Lake Pampulha, an artificial lake in
This year’s first supermoon potentially graced the sky on February 9. A supermoon is usually defined as the largest full moon possible. This is a very lose definition and roughly means this happens when the full moon occurs within 10 percent of its closest to Earth. But in reality, supermoons are never huge at all.
One of the defining characteristics of the mysterious deep-space signals we call fast radio bursts is that they are unpredictable. They belch out across the cosmos without rhyme or reason, with no discernible pattern, making them incredibly hard to study. Now, for the first time, astronomers have found a fast radio burst (FRB) that
A painting found stashed inside a wall at an Italian museum has been confirmed as the stolen “Portrait of a Lady” by Austria’s Gustav Klimt, prosecutors said on Friday, two decades after the artwork went missing. The century-old painting was discovered concealed in an external wall by gardeners at the Ricci Oddi Gallery of
Today is an exciting day in space news: We’re about to launch a spacecraft that will give us unprecedented access to our Sun’s shy sides. When United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket takes off later today, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Solar Orbiter will be snuggled inside to help us study our star up close
A full snow moon will be visible in the sky this weekend, but experts disagree about whether or not it’s a supermoon. It will be one of the biggest full moons this year, since the Moon is nearing the closest point to Earth in its orbit. But there’s no official definition for a supermoon. Astrologer
Sometimes there’s an archaeological find that makes all that laborious digging, careful brushing and meticulous cataloguing worth it – such as the 1,200-year-old board game piece that researchers have found on an island off the coast of northeastern England. This is thought to be a ‘King’ piece from a Viking board game hnefatafl (“king’s
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing on March 8, 2014, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board. The official investigation concluded the plane most likely ended up at the bottom of the southern Indian Ocean. However, two extensive search missions found no wreckage, leading some experts to believe they may
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
The ‘British X-Files’ will be released on official government websites “some time within the first quarter of 2020”. The UFO sightings were recorded by the RAF over the years in a unit which was closed down in 2009 after concluding it had never received evidence of a potential threat in more than 50 years. {%=o.title%}