Your Daily Science News Source from Around the Globe
Global warming thresholds that could tip massive ice sheets into irreversible melting or see the Amazon rainforest shrivel into savannah have “grace periods”, giving humanity more time to draw down…
Update (22 April 2021): Since we first wrote about the Moon Trees, interest in these wonderful living relics of the Apollo era has renewed. Now, the Royal Astronomical Society and…
The ocean floor is famously unexplored and is imaged in much less detail than the surfaces of Mars, the Moon and Venus. Draining the water from the oceans would reveal…
Ever since the Dead Sea Scrolls were accidentally discovered over 70 years ago in a cave in Israel, they have been a source of fascination. The scrolls are famous for…
There’s been a fabulous new achievement in particle physics. For the first time, scientists have managed to image the orbits of electrons within a quasiparticle known as an exciton –…
There’s a pervasive notion in our society that nature is something outside, over there, other, from what we are as humans. From religious texts teaching that God provided humans with…
Traces of radioactive fallout from nuclear tests in the 1950s and 1960s can still be found in American honey, new research reveals. The radioactive isotope identified, cesium-137, falls below levels…
An enormous Antarctic iceberg whose journeys were probably the most well-documented in history has now melted away to nothing in the Atlantic ocean. A68 cracked off the Larsen C ice…
There’s more than 32 times as much energy in a magnitude 8 earthquake as there is in a magnitude 7 earthquake – and scientists have discovered a natural ‘gate’ that…
The problem starts with Brazil nuts. The large edible seeds are a common fixture in mixed nut bags, but they’re not to everyone’s liking – especially since they get dry…
The dirt scattered across the floor of an ancient, remote cave in Mexico has yielded a new source of viable ancient DNA. For the first time, scientists have sequenced ancient…
As the climate crisis causes havoc in temperature and rainfall patterns around the world, one of the many crops under threat is humanity’s precious coffee. Now scientists have identified a…
Few spiders elicit as much reaction from humans as the famous and feared tarantula. These giant, hairy arachnids are known for their remarkable size, brilliant colors, and distinctive physical attributes.…
In a complete redefinition of the concept of ‘cute’, an international team of paleontologists has identified the tiniest known stegosaur footprint. Preserved in the stone in the Xinjiang Province of…
More than a year into the coronavirus pandemic, you’ve probably at least heard of Zoom fatigue – if not experienced it yourself – and now a new study has dug…
We haven’t been dependent on natural light from the Sun since the invention of the light bulb in 1879. Nowadays, many people spend most of the day not just in…
Google Earth gives you a fascinating 3D tour of the planet in your web browser, and the app’s newest feature lets you look back from the current day all the…
Algorithms can help us with everything, from choosing what music to listen to next to finding the cheapest flight online. Now, new research reveals one of the tipping points that…
For a couple of hundred years, Cahokia was the place to be in what is now the US state of Illinois. The bustling, vibrant city was at one time home…
The last ice age was a bad time for wildlife. The world froze, ecosystems changed, and humans and animals competed fiercely for available resources. By 11,700 years ago, as the…
A small, flying reptile glides beneath the canopy of an ancient forest, scouring the trees for tasty bugs. She spots a cicada buzzing in the boughs of a ginkgo tree,…
Our plastic pollution problem has become so bad that microplastics are now embedded in the regular cycles of the atmosphere, circulating around the planet like oxygen or water, according to…
Early into the pandemic it became clear that something was wrong: the first signs of a tangential and potentially deadly threat emerging in the wake of COVID-19. It was an…
An alphabetic inscription written on a jar fragment found at the site of Tel Lachish in Israel and dating back around 3,450 years may provide a “missing link” in the…
A new formula for white paint has given us the whitest white yet. It reflects a jaw-dropping 98.1 percent of all light that hits it, remaining significantly cooler than the…
Few things excite biologists more than contemplating the parts of the world still relatively free of human damage. For the last 30 years, scientists intent on protecting Earth’s biodiversity have…
For two and a half million years, the most infamous of predators, Tyrannosaurus rex, slowly stomped its way around what is today North America’s western coast. Scientists have now come…
If you could cross a monkey with a human, what might that creature tell us? We are beginning to find out. In a pioneering and controversial experiment, scientists successfully created…
New Zealand will force banks to reveal the impact their investments have on climate change under world-first legislation intended to make the financial sector’s environmental record transparent, officials said. Commerce…
To make some of the most precise measurements we can of the world around us, scientists tend to go small – right down to the atomic scale, using a technique…