Biology is really one big horror story. You don’t need to look much further than the various types of parasites that drive their hosts into the mouths of hungry predators. If you’re keeping track of these tiny monsters, you should know that there’s a species of flatworm that parks itself inside the eyeball of a
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In one of his videos from earlier this year, YouTuber Joe Scott, host of “Answers With Joe,” takes on the glaring question of the speed of light. In a vacuum, the speed of light is 299,792 kilometres per second (186,000 miles/second). That seems really fast in terms of speed as we know it here on
Researchers have created the world’s first artificial retina using soft synthetic tissue, which they say could be used to develop a new generation of less-invasive bionic eye implants in the future. Made from a combination of water-based hydrogel droplets and light-sensitive proteins, the synthetic retina is designed to mimic the functionality of its biological counterpart
More than a million people are estimated to have been caught out by a Google Docs phishing attack that spread like wildfire this Wednesday –even though Google managed to shut down the vulnerability in less than an hour once it became aware of the scam. Aside from highlighting just how easily and quickly phishing attacks
Everyone likes a shortcut and a quick trip somewhere cool, which means that everyone loves a wormhole – at least in theory. In actuality, these space-time tunnels are probably not the alleged intergalactic shortcuts we’re looking for – and this isn’t a mind trick from Obi-Wan, either. But first, let’s talk about what wormholes are
From a single species of plant comes many teas. The tea tree, a shrub called Camellia sinensis, produces white, green, black and oolong teas. The tea’s destiny is a matter of variables. The final drink reflects the tea cultivar, the growing environment and how the leaves are processed – dried, crushed, steamed, blended. Farmers pluck
Neuralink – which is “developing ultra high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers” – is probably a bad idea. If you understand the science behind it, and that’s what you wanted to hear, you can stop reading. But this is an absurdly simple narrative to spin about Neuralink and an unhelpful attitude to have
Back in 2011, scientists discovered the world’s only known example of a vertebrate cell hosting the cells of a completely different species in an act of symbiosis between a salamander and a species of algae. While similar relationships can be found in animals without a backbone, such as coral and molluscs, this unusual discovery posed
Scientists are always on the lookout for new materials that can enable improved energy storage and quicker energy transfers, and a new study suggests what could be a dramatically simple approach for achieving those ends: just add water. By adding atomically thin, nanoscale layers of water to an existing material, researchers found it was able
As complex as the human brain is, it more or less has the same fundamental structure as most other backboned animals – which means it can be divided into three general regions: forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain. Researchers have long thought that these three sections all evolved from three simpler versions in our vertebrate ancestors. But a new map of
If your internet rabbit holes have ever taken you to the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle ‘death trap’, you’ve probably come across one explanation where methane bubbles create a bizarre sinkhole situation in the middle of the ocean. It sounds cool, but as the video below explains, it’s a load of, well, sea farts, because
What would it be like to go about your life without ever seeing colours such as green or purple, and then one day seeing the world in all its colourful glory? Most people with colour blindness can only hope for such a moment to come, but for Noll Stafford from Florida it actually happened at
If there’s an award for being able to explain complex science in a simple way, no matter who’s in the audience, our nomination would be for Bobby Kasthuri from the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. In the video below, he explains the difficult concept of connectomes – a map of neural connections in the brain –
On 14 March 2017, the world celebrated what would have been Albert Einstein’s 138th birthday. But while all of us know and love the revolutionary physicist by name, how many of us actually understand his work well enough to explain it over the dinner table? If the thought of that makes you break out in a cold
If you’re looking for a really dumb thing to spend your money on, look no further than calcium-48, an extremely rare isotope of calcium that carries such an astronomical pricetag, they won’t even let world-renowned chemist Sir Martyn Poliakoff touch it. This substance is so scarce, it makes up just 0.187 percent of naturally occurring calcium on
With all this talk about colonising Mars, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Earth and all its mysteries have been well and truly uncovered by the year 2017. But as these bizarre lifeforms and the recently reclassified ‘Zealandia’ continent can attest, our planet still harbours a crapload of surprises, because as good as we humans are at exploring, there
You’ve got a super-cool ability you probably didn’t even know you had: how to tell the difference between hot running water from cold running water – through sound alone. If you don’t believe us, check out the video below from Tom Scott’s YouTube channel, hosted by Steve Mould, which includes a demonstration of cold water
Scattered across the world are a number of bewildering ‘mystery spots’ that appear to defy gravity – places where cars seem to drift uphill, and cyclists struggle to push themselves downhill. Also known as gravity hills, these bizarre natural phenomena can be found in places like Confusion Hill in California and Magnetic Hill in Canada,
Here’s a weird fact for you – a hydrogen atom has less mass than the combined mass of the proton and electron that make it up. Okay, it’s not just hydrogen – ALL elements on the periodic table weigh less than the sum of their parts. Here’s another mind-bender: if you have two objects are
For months now, there’s been speculation that researchers might have finally created time crystals – strange crystals that have an atomic structure that repeats not just in space, but in time, putting them in constant oscillation without energy. Now it’s official – researchers have just reported in detail how to make and measure these
For months now, there’s been speculation that researchers might have finally created time crystals – strange crystals that have an atomic structure that repeats not just in space, but in time, putting them in constant oscillation without energy. Now it’s official – researchers have just reported in detail how to make and measure these
We all know most maps of the world aren’t entirely accurate. For starters, Africa is way bigger than it looks, and Greenland isn’t nearly so vast. But a designer in Japan has created a map that’s so accurate it’s almost as good as a globe, and it’s probably one of the best estimations you’ll see
Earth seems drenched with water from mountaintop to ocean bottom. But our home planet is a desert compared to some places the solar system, both in terms of its total water volume and the amount of liquid on Earth relative to its size. Consider Jupiter’s ice-encrusted moon Europa, which is smaller than Earth’s moon.
Sometimes, science is all about the mind-aching big picture. Like the idea that our Universe is just a giant hologram, or that we’ve actually detected gravitational waves from a neutron star collision. Or that we might not actually have as much free will as we think… Those are really exciting concepts. But then there are
In 2015, a psychologist in Italy figured out how to induce a drug-free altered state of consciousness by asking 20 volunteers to sit and stare into each other’s eyes for 10 minutes straight. Not only did the deceptively simple task bring on strange ‘out of body’ experiences for the volunteers, it also caused them
Most of us find our first “greys” by the time we turn 30, usually at the temples, then later, across the scalp. While many people find the salt and pepper look appealing, others go to great lengths to conceal these locks. The grey hair “rule of thumb” is that by the age of 50,
In the event of a zombie apocalypse, it’s imperative that you have a plan. If you’re influenced by the movies, then you might be inclined to take your chances and head for the nearest pub or shopping mall in order to outwit a growing horde of bloodthirsty zombies. Your average shopping mall is equipped with