The nomadic tribes that occupied Central Asia 2,000 years ago used diamond drills to perforate gemstones when manufacturing necklaces, bracelets, and pendants. The hardest naturally occurring material on the planet, diamond is often used today for masonry drilling, yet its use in ancient times may also have been surprisingly widespread. ADVERTISEMENT Previous research has suggested […]
China Is Building A Crewed Deep-Sea “Space Station” To Explore Bottom Of South China Sea
Seemingly unaware of the film Deep Blue Sea and countless B-movie tropes, China is set to build a new deep-sea laboratory that will be crewed by a team of resident scientists. ADVERTISEMENT In a recent announcement, the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ South China Sea Institute of Oceanology said they hope to complete the construction of […]
AI Struggles With A Task So Basic Most 8-Year-Old Humans Can Do It
Artificial intelligence (AI) has come a long way over the last decade, moving from this horror show to pretty impressive image generation, and text generation which gets its facts right a lot of the time and confidently tells you the wrong answer when it can’t. ADVERTISEMENT But there are quite a few tasks where humans […]
Russell-McPherron Effect: Why “Cracks” In Earth’s Magnetic Field Mean We Get Peak Auroras At Equinox
Remember last year when more of us than usual were treated to a spectacular display of aurorae? If you’re one of the people who missed out, you could be in with another chance of seeing the show this week, thanks to a phenomenon known as the Russell-McPherron effect. ADVERTISEMENT While aurora season is generally considered […]
Is Zero An Odd Or Even Number?
Zero is a weird number. Well, not weird as in “abundant but not semiperfect” – let’s just say it’s “unusual”. Okay, not unusual like “its largest prime factor is strictly greater than its square root” – maybe we should just describe it as “odd”. Or should we? ADVERTISEMENT Because of its unique place on the […]
Scientists Gave A Guy A Powerful Dose Of THC In The Lab And The Results Were Curious
Cannabis is regularly found by studies to be the least risky recreational drug and has never been linked to a fatal overdose. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s look at a time when scientists at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine deliberately gave subjects an “acute” dose of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) to study […]
Watch Blue Ghost Absolutely Nail Its Recent Moon Landing In “First-Of-Its-Kind” Footage
Blue Ghost touched down on the Moon two weeks ago – and beamed back some stunning footage of its soft landing in never-before-seen detail, including “first-of-its-kind” footage of a lunar lander’s engine plumes interacting with the lunar surface. ADVERTISEMENT Firefly Aerospace, a Texas-based private company, successfully planted its Blue Ghost lunar lander in the Moon’s […]
The Dead Beneath Our Feet – 3 Times We Stumbled Upon Burial Sites In Surprising Places
What would you do if you discovered a body or human remains buried under your home while doing some renovations or general upkeep? It is likely a very unsettling experience, especially if the body has seemingly been there for a long time, resting beyond your awareness for years or even decades. ADVERTISEMENT This may sound […]
Incredibly Rare 168-Million-Year-Old Fossil Is World’s Oldest Cerapodan Ornithischian Dinosaur
Palaeontologists have uncovered the world’s oldest known cerapodan dinosaur at a fossil site in Morocco, identified by a distinctive femur. We know this dinosaur group would eventually spread across the globe, but the early stages of cerapodan evolution have remained a mystery due to the scarcity of Middle Jurassic rocks worldwide. That makes this latest […]
Adorable Cougar Cubs Spotted In Michigan For The First Time In Over 100 Years
Humankind has driven many animals to extinction, from mammoths and thylacines to passenger pigeons. However, some species have only gone locally extinct and can re-emerge in other areas if conditions change. Now, for the first time in 100 years, cougar cubs have been spotted roaming wild in Michigan. ADVERTISEMENT Two cubs were spotted on private […]
Rampant Herpes Virus Could Reach The Brain Via The Nose, Sparking Behavior Changes
A virus that most adults on Earth have been exposed to has a sneaky route into the brain, and a world-first study has now demonstrated that it can cause behavioral changes. While this form of infection thankfully appears to be rare, the authors do believe it merits more attention. ADVERTISEMENT Herpes simplex virus type 1 […]
Iguanas “Rafted” 8,000 Kilometers From North America To Fiji – A Record For Land Vertebrates
The arrival of iguanas in the South Pacific can only be explained, a team of biologists have argued, if they caught a lift on a natural raft from the Americas. That’s a journey of 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles), even if there was no backsliding or getting caught in ocean gyres – a fifth of the […]
A New Way To Detect Pacific Earthquakes Using Deep-Sea Cables Shows Groundbreaking Results
Big earthquakes remain unpredictable and often devastating, but new technology is paving the way for a groundbreaking way to monitor seismic tremors beneath the Pacific Ocean. ADVERTISEMENT Scientists from the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the UK and the Measurement Standards Laboratory (MSL) in New Zealand have transformed a section of the telecommunications cable on […]
Alien Plant With World’s Longest-Living Leaves Can Survive For Over 1,000 Years
In the hyperarid desert bridging Angola and Namibia lives a plant known by the Afrikaans tweeblaarkannidood, meaning “two leaves that cannot die”. It’s a fitting title for Welwitschia mirabilis, an alien-like plant whose astonishing biology and extreme longevity has been studied extensively. The upper estimates for maximum age stretch as far as 3,000 years, not […]
Watch The Sky Turn Red With A Total Solar Eclipse Seen From The Moon’s Surface
Blue Ghost has eyed-up all the must-see sights on the Moon. After capturing some dazzling footage of a total solar eclipse from the lunar surface, the private lander also caught imagery of a beautiful lunar sunset, marking a beautiful end to its historic mission. ADVERTISEMENT Blue Ghost, a spacecraft operated by Texas-based company Firefly Aerospace […]
Humans Have Had Language For At Least 135,000 Years
The genetic hardware that gave rise to humanity’s unique language capabilities first emerged at least 135,000 years ago, when all Homo sapiens still lived in one unbroken tribe. As this original group later split into a multitude of regional populations, the shared capacity for verbal and symbolic communication may have facilitated the development of modern […]
Pill That Cures Ebola In Monkeys Ignites Hopes For A Human Treatment
Monkeys infected with the deadly Ebola virus have been successfully cured by a 10-day regimen of pills, leading scientists to hope the treatment could be adapted for use in humans. The drug, obeldesivir, offers a substantial advantage over the two other FDA-approved treatments for Ebola as they have to be delivered via an IV drip, […]
“Once In A Century” Math Proof Threads The Needle On A Decades-Old Conjecture
If pure math can teach us anything, it’s this: occasionally, your special interest might just change the world. ADVERTISEMENT For Joshua Zahl and Hong Wang, that special interest was the Kakeya conjecture. “I read a book in undergrad called A Panorama of Harmonic Analysis,” says Zahl, an associate professor in the University of British Columbia’s […]
Supernovae Blamed For 2 Of Earth’s Mass Extinctions, The Devonian And Ordovician
Two of Earth’s five confirmed mass extinction events could have been caused by nearby supernova explosions stripping the planet’s ozone layer, a new study argues. Although the explanation has been proposed before, this work provides more rigorous evidence that the idea is plausible. ADVERTISEMENT The rate of animal and plant extinction has jumped well above […]
JWST Observations Hint We Might Be Inside A Black Hole, A New Synthetic Cannabinoid Could Pack A Painkilling Punch, And Much More This Week
This week, scientists have put a human “language gene” into mice and found it has a profound impact on the rodents’ ability to squeak, research has found that reading science articles (like these ones) can help you stay mentally strong, and in a global mission to explore Earth’s oceans, over 850 new marine species have […]
