There’s more than one way to measure a year. If you’re simply tallying up the days, weeks and months, 2019 was altogether unremarkable. But if you’re looking at global climate change, that couldn’t be further from the truth. In a disturbing new post on the agency’s official Tumblr account, NASA has laid out all
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We know that the realm of quantum physics is science operating at a mind-bogglingly small scale, thus watching quantum interactions happen is always exciting. Now, physicists have managed to observe billions upon billions of entangled electrons passing through a metal film. The film is a mix of ytterbium, rhodium and silicon, and is what’s
A cache of five newly discovered exoplanets orbiting nearby stars has been revealed in a new study. The bounty includes two potentially habitable super-Earths that are perfect candidates to study further in our search for life outside the Solar System, according to the research team. The two planets are called GJ 180 d and
A new image from the ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft shows how beautiful, and desolate, Mars can appear. It also highlights some of the natural process that shape the planet’s surface. The image is of the northern polar region, and it features bright patches of ice, deep dark troughs, and evidence of storms and strong
NASA astronaut Christina Koch shared a short but powerful message from space on Tuesday: “Australia. Our hearts and thoughts are with you.” Koch, who is living on the International Space Station, posted several photos of the smoke from Australia’s fires, as seen from her vantage point 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth. (Christina Koch/NASA) About
When scientists ran DNA analysis on a sediment core taken from the floor of the Arctic ocean back in 2010, they found something surprising. A previously unknown organism belonging to the strange domain of microbes called Archaea appeared to have genomic characteristics associated with a totally different domain – Eukaryota. They named their discovery
A secret operation by specialist firefighters has saved the world’s last stand of Wollemi Pines, a prehistoric species known as “dinosaur trees”, from Australia’s unprecedented bushfires, officials said. Fewer than 200 of the trees exist in the wild, hidden in a gorge in the World Heritage Blue Mountains, northwest of Sydney, an area hit
This year, the New York Public Library will turn 125 years old, and as a way of celebrating, its staff have combed through the data from all its branches since 1895 to find the city’s most beloved books. Each year, the library sees over 16 million visits, so this was no easy task. Analysing
Scientists have reported on another devastating biological disaster, caused by a patch of abnormally warm water in the Pacific Ocean known as ‘the Blob’. This concentrated marine heatwave lingered in the northeast Pacific between 2013 and 2016, and researchers now think it was largely responsible for the death of almost a million common murres (Uria aalge),
In the Bible, the’ “Calming of the Storm” miracle is told in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, detailing how Jesus Christ was woken during a “furious tempest” by his disciples. Jesus is reported to have said “Peace! Be still” to which the wind eased and the waves calmed, before they travelled to “the land of
The NASA astronaut is one of the six people currently working and living 250 miles (402km) above our planet. But not everyone down on Earth believes the International Space Station is real or that humans have ever even left the atmosphere. A subsection of conspiracy theorists known as Flat-Earthers has taken matters even further, by
There’s something really weird in the centre of the Milky Way. The vicinity of a supermassive black hole is a pretty weird place to start with, but astronomers have found six objects orbiting Sagittarius A* that are unlike anything in the galaxy. They are so peculiar that they have been assigned a brand-new class –
The French astrologer, whose real name was Michel de Nostradame, made a series of predictions in his book Les Prophéties from 1555, but it was his final words which proved to be the most accurate. Nostradamus, who lived from 1503 to July 2 1566, was plagued by gout throughout his later life. The ailment made
Scientists at the University of Colorado, Boulder have created what The New York Times calls a “living concrete”, teeming with photosynthetic bacteria, that can grow itself and regenerate itself – much like a living organism. The concrete is a mixture of gelatin, sand, and cyanobacteria that cools similarly to Jell-O, the Times reports. The resulting structure was able to regenerate itself
A decomposing body might gross people out, but for many creatures, it’s a bounty, including smaller creatures not widely known for their human flesh-eating habits. Case in point: a new study details how feral cats were caught on camera at a decomposition research facility in Colorado, slipping over the fence to munch on human corpses.
Phosphorus, an element that’s key in forming DNA and fuelling life on Earth, may have first arrived on the planet via comets from newborn stars. Since the element is extremely rare in the Universe, its presence on Earth has been a long-standing mystery. But scientists at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) now suggest that phosphorus
Proxima Centauri is our nearest neighbouring star; it’s just 4.2 light-years away. It has one planet that astronomers know of, a potentially habitable world called Proxima b. But in a new study, researchers from Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics report that they have observed changes in the star’s activity that indicate it could have another planet.
The past decade has been the hottest on record, the UN said Wednesday, warning that the higher temperatures were expected to fuel numerous extreme weather events in 2020 and beyond. The World Meteorological Organization, which based its findings on analysis of leading international datasets, said increases in global temperatures had already had dire consequences,
Neanderthals are not nearly as oafish or as dim-witted as we once thought. Not only did this fellow hominin walk upright with a posture not unlike our own, but some populations in Western Europe might even have swum on a regular basis. A fresh analysis of 171 shells, found in a Neanderthal archaeological site in
It was a stormy Monday afternoon in North Carolina, and 21 students at the Union Intermediate School were huddled in the gymnasium for a ‘PE day’. Then, suddenly, and without warning, all hell broke loose. “We were playing basketball,” fifth-grader Chloe Brewer told WRAL Fayetteville, “and it just sounded like something exploded in there.”
Shortly after the Solar System formed, astronomers think it went through what’s known as the Great Divide – a splitting up of the planets into two distinct groups. We weren’t around to experience this cosmic schism, but a new study has put forward an intriguing hypothesis on how it would have occurred. Put simply, the
Well-known alien conspiracy theorist Scott Waring made the shocking claims about the intriguingly-shaped Mars anomaly on his etdatabase.com blog. He said: “I found this amazing side view of a face in a Mars GigaPan photo today. “The detail is fantastic and the ear, nose, eye and forehead all have great detail to the carving.” Apparently lying on
Atlantis is the fictional island first described by Greek writer Plato in his texts Timaeus and Critias, said to be an antagonist naval power that besieges “Ancient Athens”. In the story, Athens repels the Atlantean attack unlike any other nation of the known world,supposedly giving testament to the superiority of ancient Greece. The story concludes with Atlantis falling out
Dozens of injured koalas arrive at the Kangaroo Island Wildlife Park’s makeshift animal hospital each day in cat carriers, washing baskets or clinging to wildlife carers. Injured in bushfires that have ravaged the wildlife haven off the coast of South Australia state, there are so many marsupials currently requiring urgent treatment that carers don’t have
Pop a bacterium in a petri dish on an agar nutrient medium and it will go about its business, growing in its own special way. Escherichia coli grows pretty slowly but steadily in clumps. Acinetobacter baylyi, on the other hand, moves fast, spreading out in all directions until it covers the entire petri dish in
Scientists have created the fastest spinning object ever made, taking them a big step closer to being able to measure the mysterious quantum forces at play inside ‘nothingness’. The record-breaking object in question is a tiny piece of silica, capable of whipping around billions of times per second – creating sufficient sensitivity that the
When physicists detected signals of high-energy neutrinos coming from a rather unlikely direction in the cosmos, they naturally went looking for a powerful source that might explain it. An intense examination of the most likely origins of these more reactive forms of ‘ghost’ particles has now come up empty-handed, opening the way for more
An enormous sinkhole swallowed a bus and pedestrians in northwest China, sparking an explosion and killing nine people, state media said Tuesday. Footage showed people at a bus stop running from the collapsing road as the vehicle – jutting into the air – sank into the ground. Several people disappeared into the sinkhole as
It’s often assumed that as climate change worsens, so too will the world’s risk of violent armed conflict. Over the years, many experts have warned that as weather becomes more extreme and crop yields shrink, we could begin fighting for resources and land with greater frequency and ferocity. Still, there are those who disagree.
After analyzing data from the 1950s through 2019, an international team of scientists determined that the average temperature of the world’s oceans in 2019 was 0.075 degrees Celsius (0.135 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the 1981–2010 average. That might not seem like a significant amount of warming, but given the massive volume of the oceans,
The monkeys have reportedly been stealing food and ransacking homes, causing many of the locals to flee their homes, in the Indian village of Narasapuram. In total, some 400 monkeys are thought to be involved – an amount described as an “out of control” population. Some 20 desperate families are at their wits’ end, sick
The passage of time holds few changes for the Ginkgo biloba tree, commonly known as the maidenhair. For tens of millions of years and through mass extinctions, this “botanical oddity” has stood unwavering, an ever-fixed “living fossil”, as the world ages around it. The species is practically immortal – and that’s not an exaggeration.
Today, astronauts Jessica Meir and Christina Koch are scheduled to conduct the first of three spacewalks in January to finish replacing nickel-hydrogen batteries with new lithium-ion batteries that store power generated by the solar arrays. Assuming today’s work goes as planned, NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan and ESA’s Luca Parmitano will also exit the station on Saturday, January 25, to finish installing the new Alpha
The idea of life after death has long fascinated humanity, as many are concerned about what happens to our souls when we die. Some religions, including Christianity, teach the essential part of a human’s identity, known as consciousness, continues even after the body does not. Michael Shermer, an American science writer and scientific advisor the American
Self-styled UFO expert Scott Waring made the outlandish claims about the ISS anomaly on his etdatabase.com site. He said: “I was watching the NASA live stream and noticed this huge glowing object. “The anomaly was able to match the speed with the space station. “The UFO was visible on NASA live cam for 15 minutes.”
Tardigrades are tough little critters. When conditions get nasty, they can dry out, reconfigure their bodies and enter suspended animation – called dessication – for years. You can throw virtually anything at them: frozen temperatures, zero oxygen, high pressures, the vacuum of space, cosmic radiation, and even being boiled. But new research has shown
Exhausted firefighters said they had finally brought Australia’s largest “megablaze” under control Monday, as wet weather promised to deliver much-needed respite for countryside ravaged by bushfires. New South Wales firefighters said they finally had the upper hand in the fight against the vast Gospers Mountain fire on Sydney’s northwestern outskirts, which has been burning
In another lifetime, if they had been allowed to follow their natural development, the stem cells taken from embryonic frogs would have turned into skin and heart tissue within living, breathing animals. Instead, in configurations designed by algorithms and constructed by humans, those cells have been assembled into something new: the first-ever robots constructed
23andMe’s absolutely massive bank of human genetic data – one of the largest such repositories in the world – is starting to pay off in new ways, both medically and financially. For the past five years, the Silicon Valley ancestry company has been trying to leverage its gold mine of medical data to develop
Thirty percent of Earth’s surface across land and sea should become protected areas by 2030 to ensure the viability of ecosystems essential to human wellbeing, according to a UN plan released Monday. The draft proposal to halt the degradation of nature and the gathering pace of species loss will be vetted by nearly 200
Swimming through petroleum-infested waters is not exactly good for a dolphin’s health, and if that dolphin is pregnant, the ramifications are even more dire. Following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2011, successful pregnancies in bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) plummeted, mainly from reproductive failures such as foetal mortality, distress and pneumonia, all of which are
It might look like any old 18-carat nugget of gold, but it hides a secret. Produced in the lab, this shiny disc weighs just a fraction of what it should, and has other interesting properties to boot. Unlike a typical chunk of the bright metal, here the gold nanocrystals are held together with a
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
The oldest solid material on Earth has just been identified, and it predates the Solar System itself by at least a few hundred million years. The teensy tiny microscopic grains of dust were forged in a distant star somewhere between 5 and 7 billion years ago, according to new research. By comparison, our Sun is just
About 800,000 years ago, a monster space rock struck the Earth hard and fast. The impact of the 1.2 mile-wide (1.9 kilometre-wide) meteorite flung debris across 10 percent of the planet’s surface. Scientists have found this ancient debris, mostly in the form of glass blobs known as tektites, in Asia, Australia, and Antarctica. But
Astronomers recently discovered that a long time ago, a collision with a satellite galaxy did something interesting to the Milky Way, puffing up its disc and seeding its halo with stars. Now, we’ve established a more precise time frame for that event, all thanks to a single star. That star is visible in the night sky.
A gold bar found in a Mexico City park in 1981 was part of the Aztec treasure looted by Hernan Cortes and the Spanish conquistadors 500 years ago, a new study says. The 1.93-kilogram bar was found by a construction worker during excavations for a new building along the Alameda, a picturesque park in the
Canadians throughout the Province of Ontario received an emergency push alert early Sunday morning about a nuclear “incident” in the city of Pickering, 30 minutes outside Toronto. The alert said it applied to people within 10 kilometers of the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station, and while it said “NO abnormal release of radioactivity from the