One of the iconic staples of Britain’s infamously dubious cuisine is black pudding, a grainy dark sausage commonly seen alongside a full English breakfast. However, it’s lesser known to friends on the other side of the Atlantic that the main ingredient of this food is blood. Native to the UK and Ireland, black pudding is […]
“New Baby Smell” Is Real – And Incredibly Important For Parents
Ask any new parent and they’ll tell you how their baby smells indescribably pleasant (as long as their diaper has been recently changed). This isn’t just a matter of parents doting over their newborns: “new baby smell” is a real thing and it appears to play an incredibly effective role in building bonds. In 2019, […]
What Is the Five-Finger Breathing Technique And Can It Really Help You Sleep?
If you’re someone who struggles to get to sleep or experiences anxiety and stress, then a technique that is being showcased on TikTok and other social media platforms may be able to help you. The so-called “five finger breathing technique”, which sounds like something from an old martial arts film, can allegedly make it easier […]
Spoiler Alert – This Is What’s Coming From JWST In The Coming Months
This week, JWST marked one year of official science missions. To celebrate, a special image was released, a standard birthday gift the telescopes tend to do. Veterans like Hubble have dozens of them, for example. We sat down with some of the astronomers working on JWST, and the excitement for the year was more than […]
Why Can’t The Brain Feel Any Pain?
We all know what a headache feels like. Whether it’s from overindulgence the night before, staring at a screen for too long, or even just eating ice cream too quickly, the occasional pain in the head is a fact of life. At their most severe, disorders like migraine and cluster headaches can be very serious […]
Alien Hand Syndrome: When Your Limbs Get A Mind Of Their Own
Brain and nerve damage is most often associated with loss of control over areas associated with the damage – paraplegics, for example, may lose control over their legs following a spinal cord injury. However, what if that damage didn’t make the limb stop moving, but instead gave it a mind of its own? This strange […]
These Are The Most Rectangular And Circular Countries In The World
Any self-respecting trivia fan can tell you the largest country on Earth and most likely the smallest, but do you know the most rectangular? What about the most circular? What’s the most rectangular country in the world? As explained on his blog, Australian statistician David Barry came across a friend’s Facebook comment saying that Turkey […]
JWST May Have Found The First Evidence For “Dark Stars”
The bright galaxies the JWST has discovered existing unexpectedly soon after the Big Bang might be powered not by hydrogen fusing, as stars are today, but by concentrations of Dark Matter, physicists have proposed. These “Dark Stars” are claimed to have masses a million times that of the Sun. Don’t let the name fool you, […]
People Are Just Now Learning How Vegetarian Sausages Are Made
It’s come to our attention lately that people aren’t really aware of how certain foods (like crab sticks) are made. This is perfectly understandable, given that for most modern humans when you fancy some parmesan you merely have to have an awkward interaction with a waiter rather than head out to kill a baby cow […]
Space Cadets: The “Most Expensive” Television Prank In Human History
In 2005, a group of young British folk involved in a reality TV show braced themselves in a Russian space shuttle base before being blasted into space. Or so they thought. Space Cadets, broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK, saw 12 people sign up to go into low-Earth orbit for five days. They had […]
JWST Celebrates First Year With Stunning Star Birth Like We’ve Never Seen Before
To celebrate the one-year anniversary of the JWST a brand new image has been released of the closest star-forming region to Earth, capturing star birth in a way we have never seen before. The JWST is the largest and most powerful telescope ever made. Launched into space on Christmas Day 2021 at a cost of […]
Close Companions Make Ghost Stars Align With The Galactic Plane
When stars die, they leave behind beautiful wispy clouds of gas known as planetary nebulae – or, more poetically, “ghost stars”. These only last tens of thousands of years, compared to the billions of years most stars survive, but ten years ago a strange pattern was found amongst them. A new study indicates close binary […]
Gray Matter Vs White Matter: What Is In A Brain?
If you ever have the chance to look at a human brain outside the protective dome of the skull, you’ll find it looks distinctly… gray. And wet. But mostly gray. This color is almost irrevocably linked with the brain, perhaps most famously by Agatha Christie’s protagonist Hercule Poirot, who talked of his “little gray cells” […]
Fallstreak Holes Look Like Giant “Portals” To Another Dimension
The sheer size of clouds, their deceptively hefty weight, and the threat of getting trapped inside one can make the prospect of giant sky marshmallows pretty terrifying. So, how would you feel seeing one start to sprout what appears to be a giant portal to an alternate dimension? Fear not, the phenomenon that makes it […]
Earth’s Worst Day? Chris Packham Explores The Planet’s Most Catastrophic Moments In “Earth”
Asteroid strikes, colliding continents, seismic eruptions, and the arrival of a devastating species – Earth’s had a lot to deal with in its day. These events do, however, make for great television, and you can get swept up in some of the most epic and destructive events in our planet’s history in a new five-part […]
How The Sun Saved Us From A 65-Hour Day
The Earth’s rotation is gradually slowing down, thanks to interactions with the Moon. Two billion years ago, there was a pause in those changes that lasted about a billion years. A new study not only explains this, but calculates how long the day would be if that pause had never occurred – and the answer […]
Ancient Egyptian Artists’ Methods Revealed By X-Ray Scanning Techniques
Researchers have just unraveled some of the subtle mysteries behind ancient Egyptian art. Using new scanning techniques, the team have shown how artists approached and modified tomb paintings that were either not up to scratch or needed reworks. The study of ancient Egyptian paintings is as old as Egyptology itself. Since the 19th century, generations […]
Watch The Moon Whizz Around Our Home Planet As Seen From Mars
It’s not often we see our planet and satellite from the perspective of another world, and we’ve never seen them like this before. That little white dot zooming around the slightly bigger white dot, that’s the Moon orbiting Earth as seen from Mars. To celebrate its 20th anniversary, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express […]
Anti-Aging Breakthrough As Scientists Reverse Aging With Simple Drug Cocktail
Scientists claim to have reverted cells to a younger state by using just a chemical therapy, marking a potential breakthrough in anti-aging research. The study builds on existing research into anti-aging genes that won a Nobel Prize, so the approach certainly warrants a closer look, though it remains experimental and on small cell cultures at […]
“Vampire Facials” And Other Injections At Albuquerque Spa Linked With New HIV Cases
Authorities are urging guests of a New Mexico spa to get come forward for HIV, hepatitis B, and hepatitis C testing after multiple former guests were infected with HIV following procedures including “vampire facials”. The New Mexico Department of Health has been investigating a cluster of HIV cases associated with the VIP Spa in Albuquerque […]