Climate Change Has Now Invisibly Shifted Earth’s Axis, New Data Reveal
Humanity’s impacts on our planet’s climate are so profound, we have for decades been unwittingly shifting the very axis upon which Earth spins around, scientists say. In a new study,…
15 People Just Spent 40 Days in a Cave Without Phones, Clocks, or Sunlight
Fifteen volunteers have emerged from a cave in the southwest of France after spending 40 days without clocks, phones, or sunlight for a human isolation experiment. The group of eight…
Even 150 Years Later, Lush Forest Gardens Showcase The Value of Native Stewardship
The way humans manage the environment doesn’t have to be destructive. In the western corner of Canada, ecologists have shown forests once tended by First Nations people are healthier and…
Eggs That Act Like Ticking Time Bombs Allow Brown Locusts to Survive Intense Droughts
The Northern Cape and Eastern Cape provinces of South Africa recently experienced their longest drought in 100 years. The seven-year drought, starting with lack of rains in February 2013, wrought…
Dire Predictions Suggest Antarctic Rainfall Will Dramatically Intensify This Century
Scientists have identified another major incoming shift in weather patterns caused by the pressures of climate change, predicting more rainfall along the coast of Antarctica, currently the driest continent on…
Scientists Just Identified a New Species of Dumbo Octopus, No Dissection Required
Confirming a new species of octopus usually involves lab tests and dissections. Not so with the Grimpoteuthis imperator dumbo octopus that has just been identified, with non-invasive scanning doing almost…
Humanity Now Lives in The Anthropocene. But What Does That Actually Mean?
In the last two decades, the Anthropocene has become an informal buzzword to describe the numerous and unprecedented ways humans have come to modify the planet. As the concept has…
Why Are There No Horse-Sized Rabbits? We Finally Know The Evolutionary Answer
If you’ve ever wondered why rabbits and hares never evolved to be the size of horses, scientists have now got the answer. It might sound like a flippant question, but…
Plastics Can Be Broken Down in to Fuel, And We Just Found a Great Method For It
If you didn’t know already, we have bad news – the plastic recycling industry is severely under-performing. Only 9 percent of plastic waste ever produced has been recycled. Around 12…
Our Sense of Time Is Warped When We Catch The Eye of Another Person
Our language weighs heavily with idioms and clichés about the human gaze. Whether they’re windows to the soul, or we’re staring daggers, eye contact communicates more about our intentions than…
Disastrous Climate Tipping Points Could Be Reversed
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…
A New Search Has Begun For Moon Trees, The Glorious Legacy of Apollo 14
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…
Volcanic Blasts Deep Under The Ocean Are Shockingly Powerful, New Study Reveals
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…
New Analysis Finds a Mysterious Second Author For One of The Dead Sea Scrolls
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…
Physicists Have Caught Electron Orbits in an Exciton Quasiparticle For The First Time
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 –…
Humans Shaped Life on Earth For 12,000 Years, And It Wasn’t All Doom And Destruction
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…
American Honey Still Contains Radioactive Fallout From Nuclear Tests Decades Ago
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…
The Huge, Infamous A68 Iceberg Has Finally Melted Away to Nothing
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…
Major Earthquake Fault Study Reveals How Earth Controls The Magnitude of Ruptures
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…
We Finally Know How The Biggest Nuts Always Rise to The Top
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…
Ancient Bear DNA Sequenced From Old Cave Dirt in Historic First For Science
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…
Scientists Rediscover a Rare, Wild Species That Could Save Coffee From Climate Change
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…
Tarantulas Are Basically All Over The Planet, And Scientists Can Finally Explain Why
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.…
The Smallest Stegosaur Footprint Ever Found Will Make You Squee With Joy
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…
‘Zoom Fatigue’ May Finally Have an Explanation, And It’s Affecting Women More
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…
Technology Really Is Changing Human Circadian Rhythms, Scientists Say
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 Now Shows You The Consequences of Climate Change For The Past 37 Years
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…
This Is The Point When People Start Trusting Algorithms More Than Other Humans
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…
The Mystery Deepens Over Why The Lost City of Cahokia Was Abandoned
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…
We May Finally Know How Gray Wolves Survived The Last Ice Age Mass Extinction
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…
This Flying ‘Monkeydactyl’ Is The Only Known Pterosaur With Opposed Thumbs
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,…
Microplastics Are Now Spiralling Around The Globe in The Air We Breathe
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…
Our Pandemic Trash Is Killing Wildlife on a Devastating Scale, Scientists Warn
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…
A Missing Link in The History of The Alphabet Might Finally Be Discovered
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…
World’s Whitest Paint Reflects 98.1% of Light. It Could Help in The Climate Fight
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…
Only 3% of Earth’s Land Ecosystems Remain Intact, But All Is Not Lost
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…
There Were a Whole Lot More T. Rex’s Terrorizing Earth Than You Might Imagine
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…
Controversial ‘Chimera’ Embryos Made by Scientists Are Part Human, Part Monkey
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 Just Passed a Climate Change Law No Other Country’s Dared to Tackle
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…
For The First Time, Scientists Have Performed Atom Interferometry in Space
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…