Many think of dogs as loyal, love-filled companions, and cats as cute beasts that tolerate us – but we might have to rethink that a little. According to 2019 research, cats can get just as bonded to their human friends as dogs do.   This may not come as a huge surprise to those who

According to legend, the devil once took a walk down the side of a volcano in southern Italy, each step preserved forever in solid rock. The tracks are known as the “Ciampate del Diavolo“‘ or “Devil’s Trail” – but new details reveal a less diabolical yet far more interesting story on how they came to

If the dead could talk, they’d probably have a lot to say. Still, it’s pretty darn tough when you can only make one sound and you’ve lost your tongue. Under these unforgiving conditions, the 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy Nesyamun should be forgiven for merely grumbling out an “eeeeyhh”.   After several millennia of not making a

The Doomsday Clock has jumped closer to midnight than it’s ever been in its 73-year history, indicating looming apocalyptic threats. The clock is a symbol created at the dawn of the Cold War. Its time is set annually by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a group founded by researchers who helped build the first

The devastating volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE – which wiped out settlements including Pompeii and Herculaneum in blasts of molten rock and ash – may have turned the brains of some of its sorry victims to glass, a new study concludes.   Analysis of one skull, recovered from the Herculaneum site in

Snakes – the Chinese krait and the Chinese cobra – may be the original source of the newly discovered coronavirus that has triggered an outbreak of a deadly infectious respiratory illness in China this winter.   The illness was first reported in late December 2019 in Wuhan, a major city in central China, and has

You didn’t misread that headline. People have been putting soy sauce on their testicles to see whether their nether parts can detect the salty condiment, and recording their reactions for the benefit of social media, particularly Tik Tok.   How did we get here in the year of our lord 2020, you ponder? In short,

A new SARS-like virus has killed six people in China and infected nearly 300 others. Fears have been mounting that the virus will spread during the massive annual Lunar New Year migration. A host of Asian countries and the United States have introduced new screening checks for passengers from Wuhan, the Chinese city identified as

Imagine that you roll out of bed onto a living fungus floor. The walls and ceiling – heck, the whole apartment building, down to the plumbing and electrical systems – are made of fungus too.   Wood and concrete are remnants of the distant past; this entire city, from the schools to the stores to

They look amazing. All across the internet, you can find them: images of rocks, stones, and pebbles assembled into elaborate, sometimes gravity-defying stacks. These eye-catching photos, usually framed against stunning natural backdrops, evoke an almost mystical sense of calmness when we see them. But there’s a dark side to their contrived wonder, researchers warn.  

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, as the saying goes. And it seems that could be true of Homo sapiens as a whole. Just as our activities today drive other animals to extinction, so too, new research suggests, did those of human ancestors millions of years ago.   By examining the fossil record in East

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

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

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.

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

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

Playing with a tiny human is one of those small pleasures in life where you really feel like you’re connecting with a person. It’s not just in your mind, either. We now have evidence that the rise and fall of their brain activity matches yours when you play together.   A study conducted by researchers

Sometimes seemingly small changes can have a huge impact. In a new observational study, researchers in the United States have found a link between a mere $1 increase in minimum hourly wage and decreased suicide rates.   While suicide rates are generally falling in the rest of the developed world, the US have seen a

Today, the vast majority of scientists agree that humans are causing unprecedented changes to our planet. Yet whether that warrants delineating an entirely new epoch is something geologists continue to disagree on.   Some think the impact of humans is now so great, it exceeds the natural processes of the Holocene, while others argue there’s

One of the world’s most famous runestones is now believed to have been erected by Vikings fearing a repeat of a previous cold climate crisis in Scandinavia, a new study said Wednesday.   The Rok stone, raised in the ninth century near the lake Vattern in south central Sweden, bears the longest runic inscription in

Some radiation therapy patients report seeing flashes of light in front of their eyes during treatment – even when their eyes are closed. Now this long-standing mystery may have been solved, thanks to this weird effect being caught on camera for the first time.   What’s happening, according to a new study, is that enough

In recent years, anthropologists around the world have discovered new human ancestors, figured out what happened to the Neanderthals, and pushed back the age of the earliest member of our species.   Taken together, these breakthroughs suggest that many of our previous ideas about the human origin story – who we are and where we

The grand, sprawling palace built by the Roman Emperor Nero nearly 2,000 years ago has been keeping a secret. While working on restorations in 2019, archaeologists found a secret chamber – a large underground room decorated with murals depicting both real and mythical creatures.   In red and ochre hues, with traces of gilding, centaurs

What will happen in the 2020s? If history is any guide (and there’s good reason to think it is), the outlook isn’t great. Here are some big-picture predictions: stagnant real wages, faltering standard of living for the lower and middle classes, worsening wealth inequality, more riots and uprisings, ongoing political polarisation, more elites competing for

In pet-loving nations such as Australia, nobody likes the idea of dogs churning out litters in squalid conditions or sitting homeless in a shelter. Responsible dog owners are therefore strongly encouraged to desex their pets, through programs such as national desexing month and low-cost surgery schemes. In some places in Australia, it is even compulsory.

There’s a giant contradiction in the middle of the Arizona desert: an experimental city designed for thousands that now contains only a few dozen inhabitants. For nearly five decades, a group called the Cosanti Foundation has been working to build a city that would inspire a new future of urban design. Today, the project is

A Chinese court on Monday sentenced the scientist who claimed to be behind the world’s first gene-edited babies to three years in prison for illegal medical practice, state media reported.   He Jiankui, who shocked the scientific community last year by announcing the birth of twin girls whose genes had allegedly been altered to confer

Our brains are capable of detecting the location of touch even when it’s not directly on the body, new research shows. An intriguing new study indicates that we can sense how an object we’re holding comes into contact with something else – almost as if it were an extension of ourselves.   If you’re holding

The lines are blurring, any which way you look. Thanks to the incredible pace of scientific progress, the very definition of what it means to be ‘human’ is becoming an increasingly open question.   In a world where living beings like genetically edited babies and human-animal hybrids are made to exist, the questions aren’t only

Seven thousand years ago, long before modern industry began to heat the planet, rising seas threatened a community on the coast of Israel. The villagers needed to defend their home, so they built a wall.   It failed. People abandoned the village. The Mediterranean Sea swept inland and drowned the buildings. But the sea may

It’s that time of year when people make their New Year’s resolutions – indeed, 93 percent of people set them, according to the American Psychological Association. The most common resolutions are related to losing weight, eating healthier, exercising regularly and saving money.   However, research shows that 45 percent of people fail to keep their

From finding the building blocks for life on Mars to breakthroughs in gene editing and the rise of artificial intelligence, here are six major scientific discoveries that shaped the 2010s – and what leading experts say could come next   Are we alone? We don’t yet know whether there was ever life on Mars –

The English word “love” can be translated as “sevgi” in Turkish and “szerelem” in Hungarian – but does the concept carry the same meaning for speakers of all three tongues? Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History have used a new

In the early 1930s, Dutch anthropologists found a giant bed of bones hidden above the banks of the Solo river on the Indonesian island of Java. More than 25,000 fossil specimens were buried in the river mud in an area called Ngandong, including 12 skull caps and two leg bones from a particularly intriguing human

We don’t know their names, but two people who lived and died in Bronze Age Greece 3,500 years ago were obviously hugely important to the people around them. Archaeologists have just found their tombs, so opulent they were once lined with gold leaf, and filled with exquisite grave goods.   It is, the researchers say,

Every day, “porch pirates” steal an estimated 1.7 million packages. And as former NASA engineer Mark Rober learned in the summer of 2018, even with footage of the theft, police often can’t track down the jerks responsible.   That’s why, in December 2018, Rober used his engineering know-how to rig a package so that, if

When the Nobel Prizes were awarded two months ago, the nine science laureates were all men, highlighting the long-standing lack of opportunities for women in science. Gender disparities in science and medicine have been studied by task forces and committees that have identified problems and possible solutions, but stark gaps remain – at the highest

Merit Ptah. In recent decades, the name of this ancient Egyptian doctor, said to have lived nearly 5,000 years ago, has become a figurehead of women in science, technology, maths, and engineering (STEM).   She is credited as being the “first woman known by name in the history of science”. But there’s a bit of

In a landmark study, scientists have reconstructed the genome of an ancient human who lived some 5,700 years ago in what we now know as southern Denmark. No known physical remains of the woman in question exist. All we have to go on, in fact, is just a small lump of birch pitch – an

About 3,500 years separate the two cups that will sit next to each other at the heart of a new museum exhibit in London. One is a paper discard from the 1990s. Researchers believe the other, made from clay, may have held wine before it was thrown out after an ancient party on the island

For hundreds of years, they stood watch in silence: the ‘moai‘, a mysterious league of almost 1,000 carved monolithic statues, erected across the isolated landscape of Easter Island (Rapa Nui).   Just how these towering idols came to be has long fascinated researchers – as have the customs and collapse of the Polynesian society that

The world’s donkeys are experiencing a global massacre like never before. In the next five years, more than half their population could be wiped out, according to a new report from the international charity Donkey Sanctuary; and it’s all because of their precious hides.   When soaked and stewed, the skin of the donkey can be

In the age of FOMO (fear of missing out) and YOLO (you only live once), people are pursuing sensations and memories over material products more than ever. Statistics from Barclaycard show that in the UK, spending on theme parks, tourist attractions, garden centres, pubs and restaurants is on the up, while sales for department stores,

Archaeologists working in Indonesia say they have discovered the earliest artwork that depicts a story. It is a tale told in red pigment on a cave wall. The scene, in the scientists’ interpretation, shows supernatural people hunting wild animals.   People living on the island of Sulawesi drew this image of pigs and horned animals

Some archaeological finds have to be seen to be believed, and the discovery of the 2,200-year-old grave of a male Celtic warrior has experts very excited indeed – as you’ll understand once you take a peek at the haul.   Among the findings in the grave is an ornate shield described as “the most important

Most of the garments depicted in ancient Egyptian art are relatively straightforward to decipher, but there’s a particular wearable article that has baffled archaeologists. In statuary, murals, funerary stelae, coffins and relief sculptures dating between 3,570 and 2,000 years ago, people repeatedly appeared wearing cones on their heads, a bit like party hats.   Now,