As a species, humans have populated almost every corner of the earth. We have developed technologies and cultures which shape the world we live in. The idea of ‘natural selection’ or ‘survival of the fittest’ seems to make sense in Stone Age times when we were fighting over scraps of meat, but does it still
Month: September 2020
Scientists in Japan have developed a paper-based sensor equipped with an array of extremely tiny microneedles, which they say can painlessly penetrate human skin for a quick and easy method of conducting diagnostic tests for conditions like pre-diabetes. Microneedles are super tiny-spikes so small they’re measured in micrometres (one thousandth of a millimetre), designed
The world’s most advanced telescopes were not made for today’s temperatures, and it’s messing with our observations of the night sky. Three decades-worth of data from the Paranal Observatory in northern Chile – home of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) – has revealed several ways in which climate change is already impacting
Magnetism and electricity are linked together in many weird and wonderful ways throughout science, including the fascinating magnetoelectric effect noticeable in some crystals – where the electrical properties of a crystal can be influenced by a magnetic field, and vice versa. Now things have gotten even weirder, because scientists have discovered a brand new
Two experiments hunting for a whisper of a particle that prevents whole galaxies from flying apart recently published some contradictory results. One came up empty handed, while the other gives us every reason to keep on searching. Dark bosons are dark matter candidates based on force-carrying particles that don’t really pack much force. Unlike
Here’s how active this year’s Atlantic hurricane season has been: When Tropical Storm Wilfred formed on September 18, the National Hurricane Center exhausted its list of storm names for only the second time since naming began in 1950. Within hours, two more storm had formed – now known as Alpha and Beta. Even more
Making educated guesses is something we all do every day – but until now scientists haven’t fully understood how these leaps in logic are processed in the brain. Now new research on mice and humans suggests neurons can effectively ‘join the dots’ between two thoughts to figure something out. If you’re looking for a
Around 120,000 years ago in what is now northern Saudi Arabia, a small band of Homo sapiens stopped to drink and forage at a shallow lake that was also frequented by camels, buffalo, and elephants bigger than any species seen today The people may have hunted the large mammals but they did not stay
We’re still a long way from realising the full potential of quantum computing, but scientists are making progress all the time – and as a sign of what might be coming, IBM now says it expects to have a 1,000 qubit machine up and running by 2023. Qubits are the quantum equivalents of classical
Australia is home to some of the world’s most dangerous wildlife. Anyone who spends time outdoors in eastern Australia is wise to keep an eye out for snakes, spiders, swooping birds, crocodiles, deadly cone snails and tiny toxic jellyfish. But what not everybody knows is that even some of the trees will get you.
What is a Viking? The word conjures an unmistakable mental image: the stereotype of bold Scandinavian invaders, fearsome marauders with white skin and pale hair, ruthlessly raiding and voyaging their way across the globe over 1,000 years ago. Only, there is a mistake after all, it seems – crucial details in this longstanding legend
Scientists call it the doomsday glacier. That’s partly because the Thwaites, a Britain-sized glacier in western Antarctica, is melting at an alarming rate: It’s retreating by about half a mile (2,625 feet) per year. Scientists estimate the glacier will lose all of its ice in about 200 to 600 years. When it does, it will raise
The spread of humans out of Africa through the Middle East may have been helped along by a very ordinary substance: dust. More specifically, the silty sediment known as loess seems to have played a crucial role in making the Southern Levant, on the east coast of the Mediterranean, such a fertile and hospitable corridor of
High above the Arctic Circle lies a group of remote Siberian islands where ivory traders and scientists brave sub-zero temperatures to search for extinct creatures preserved in the melting permafrost. Those Lyakhovsky Islands just yielded an unprecedented find: a perfectly preserved adult cave bear – with its nose, teeth, and internal organs still intact. Scientists think
A sudden and potentially unprecedented mass die-off of migratory birds in New Mexico and elsewhere appears to have killed hundreds of thousands of birds, and perhaps even millions, scientists estimate. In recent weeks, biologists and ornithologists have watched in shock and despair as hundreds of dead birds were discovered in numerous spots across the
Countries are set to miss all of the targets they set themselves a decade ago to preserve nature and save Earth’s vital biodiversity, the United Nations (UN) said Tuesday. Humanity’s impact on the natural world over the last five decades has been nothing short of cataclysmic: since 1970 close to 70 percent of wild animals,
A 100-million-year-old chunk of amber has revealed the oldest-ever sample of animal sperm, and each individual cell is enormously long. Even more impressive, this giant sperm – several times larger than human sperm – comes from a shrimp-like crustacean smaller than a poppyseed. Just shy of 0.6 millimetres, this ancient bivalve belongs to a
We don’t know exactly how they do it, we just know it’s an amazing gift. For decades, evidence has shown that all sorts of animals can sense magnetic fields and even use them to navigate their way around the planet. This mysterious ability, called magnetoreception, is something that helps animals to make long-haul migrations,
During a hot summer night in the Australian state of New South Wales, ecologist Heloise Gibb and her team were hunting for scorpions in some arid scrubland. Using special UV-proof glasses and UV flashlights, they were looking for a flicker of fluorescence indicating a scorpion, which have become abundant in the damaged, sandy deserts of
A massive chunk of ice – larger than the city of Paris – has broken off from the Arctic’s largest ice shelf because of warmer temperatures in Greenland, scientists said Monday. The 113-square-kilometre (43-square-mile) block broke off the Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden glacier in Northeast Greenland, which the scientists said had been expected given the rising average
From bird feathers to fruit skins, the natural world has two main ways of displaying colour: through pigment substances that provide selective colour absorption, or through structural colour – the use of microscopic structures to control light reflection. Now scientists have devised a computer model that explains why the brightest matte structural colours in
Divers from Finland have made an unexpected discovery while exploring the depths of the Baltic Sea, finding an incredibly well-preserved shipwreck dating back almost 400 years. Volunteer divers from the non-profit Badewanne team more often come across wrecked 20th century relics sunk during the sea battles of World War I and WWII, so uncovering
A leading expert on indigenous peoples in Brazil was shot dead with an arrow apparently fired by a member of an isolated tribe in the Amazon rainforest, officials and a journalist in the region said Thursday. Rieli Franciscato, 56, the head of a program to protect indigenous groups that have little or no contact
At first, the idea of a walking fish sounds ridiculous – but such hybrid creatures have played a key role in the evolution of the animal kingdom on Earth. Now, new research has shown that more fish than we ever realised may be able to walk about on land. That’s according to a detailed
Whether it’s robots working in a disaster area, autonomous cars getting around town, or satellites peering down through space, having machines that can see through clouds, haze and fog is incredibly useful – and scientists may have just made the best system yet. The newly developed system works via an algorithm that measures the
For the better part of a century, the world’s greatest minds have struggled with the mathematical certainty that objects can be in multiple positions at the same time before something causes them to snap into place. A number of physicists have wondered if good old gravity is responsible for forcing the particle equivalent of
There are competing hypotheses around the decline of the Indus Valley Civilization in South Asia some 3,000 years ago, but a new mathematical proof has identified that climate change could have been responsible. Mathematical scientist Nishant Malik from the Rochester Institute of Technology crunched the numbers and found new evidence to back up the
Picking the kids up from school takes on a different meaning for crocodylian parents. In this photo, taken by India-based photographer Dhritiman Mukherjee, a male freshwater gharial shows us why. Bobbing in the waters of northern India’s National Chambal Sanctuary, the croc waits as more than 100 of his month-old children clamber onto his back for safe
In the salt water marshes of southern California, a splashing killifish is easy prey for a hungry shorebird. Like a jerking marionette, the helpless creature shimmies and flashes on the surface of the water. And all the while, hiding deep in its brain, an invisible other quietly pulls the strings. The puppeteer in question
According to ancient legend, a beautiful maiden named Ashima drowned in a river, and turned into stone. This, it has been said for centuries, is how China’s stunning Stone Forest of Shilin first took shape. According to new research, however, there’s another explanation for the phenomenon that gives stone forests their surreal and otherworldly
Often it’s the most minute scientific measurements that are the most important, and researchers have developed a new, super-small device that’s capable of detecting magnetic fields even when they’re extremely faint. The device, a new kind of superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID), is just 10 nanometres high, or around a thousandth of the thickness of a
Sixty-six million years ago, after a massive asteroid hit Earth with the explosive energy of roughly 1 billion nuclear bombs, a shroud of ash, dust and vaporized rock covered the sky and slowly rained down on the planet. As plant and animal species died en masse, tiny undersea amoebas called forams continued to reproduce, building sturdy shells out
Our cells still hold tightly onto many secrets about their origins. But recently discovered giant viruses may hold clues to one such secret – the mysterious emergence of a cell’s main store of instructions, the nucleus. The presence of a nucleus distinguishes our eukaryotic cells from other cellular life forms. Bacteria and archaea tend
For tens of thousands of years, a Neanderthal molar rested in a shallow grave on the floor of the Stajnia Cave in what is now Poland. For all that time, viable mitochondrial DNA remained locked inside – and now, finally, scientists are discovering its secrets. Labelled Stajnia S5000, the tooth belonged to a Neanderthal
Global animal, bird and fish populations have plummeted more than two-thirds in less than 50 years due to rampant over-consumption, experts said Thursday in a stark warning to save nature in order to save ourselves. Human activity has severely degraded three quarters of all land and 40 percent of Earth’s oceans, and our quickening
San Francisco residents awoke on Wednesday to discover a glowing orange sky. Smoke from wildfires has been covering San Francisco for weeks, but the layer that blew in on Wednesday morning was much thicker. And as the day wore on, the sky took on a darker hue of orange, making life in the city
New research shows that around a fifth of all carbon emissions in recent years has come from the assets and suppliers of multinational corporations – and the flow of money indicates that pollution is effectively being outsourced from the developed to the developing world. The team behind the study wants to highlight how much
Archaeologists in hard hats and face masks carefully remove earth from around enormous bones at the site of Mexico City’s new airport, where construction work has uncovered a huge trove of mammoth skeletons. The remains of dozens of the extinct giants and other prehistoric creatures have been found in Zumpango on the northern edge
Trees that grow quickly die younger, risking a release of carbon dioxide that challenges forecasts that forests will continue to be a “sink” for planet-warming emissions, scientists said Tuesday. Tree cover absorbs a significant proportion of carbon dioxide emitted by burning fossil fuels and plays a crucial role in projections for our ability to
Living at higher altitudes in the US may shape your psychology in strange ways, a new study reveals, showing a distinct link between living in elevated, mountainous regions and certain personality traits. Not only that, but the kinds of traits mountain-dwellers demonstrate are quite specific, researchers say, rooted in the pioneer history of the
An unusual cache of at least 13 wooden coffins dating back to 2,500 years ago has been discovered in the desert necropolis of Saqqara in Egypt. What makes these coffins so special among the thousands interred in the tomb complex is the fact they have remained intact for millennia, and are still completely sealed –
“Zombie” wildfires that were smoldering beneath the Arctic ice all winter suddenly flared to life this summer when the snow and ice above it melted, new monitoring data reveal. And this year has been the worst for Arctic wildfires on record, since reliable monitoring began 17 years ago. Arctic fires this summer released as much carbon in the
A growing body of drug research has shown that experiences with psychedelic drugs can be both positive and negative – scary and uncomfortable for some, but leading to improvements in well-being and relationships for others. These substances also show promising early results for treating mental disorders, in controlled doses. So why the disparity between
To the innocent eyes of animals, the appearance of humans on the horizon represents more of an existential threat than the vast environmental upheaval of previous climate change up until now, new research suggests. According to a new study, mammal extinctions tracing back as far as 126,000 years ago have had more to do
It often seems impossible to know what’s going on in Fido’s head as he lounges on his dog bed. But a handful of new studies offer surprising insights about how our canine companions age, perceive human speech, and find their way home. A study published last month showed that dogs understand verbal communication just like
A little baby horse named Kurt is a symbol of renewed hope for the survival of his kind. Born on 6 August 2020, he is the world’s first ever successfully cloned Przewalski’s horse, an endangered wild horse native to the steppes of central Asia. What makes Kurt even more exciting is that he was
Two hundred ancient mammoth skeletons have been discovered beneath an airport construction site north of Mexico City – the largest collection of mammoth bones ever found. Archaeologists at Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History first realised the area might hide mammoth remains after they found two human-dug mammoth traps in November as part of