Let’s face it, whether you’re a Christmasy person or not, whether you are religious or irreverent, this holiday season touches most of us in various (sometimes complex) ways. Many families will have their traditions and expectations, while those who do not celebrate will certainly be aware of its ubiquity. But traditions come and go, and […]
Singing Ankylosaurs, 310-Million-Year-Old Fossil Spiders, And A “Giant Sea Monster” Join The Planet’s Prehistoric Wonders
Some of the biggest news stories of 2023 were, in fact, tens, or even hundreds, of millions of years old, as we discovered incredible new species dating back to the Jurassic and beyond. As technology marches on, scientists are finding new ways to analyze ancient specimens all the time, and they’ve turned up some incredible […]
Lost 1,750-Year-Old Bible Translation Fragment Found Inside Vatican Library Manuscript
A new chapter of the Bible has been found, hidden inside a 1,750-year-old translation from the Gospel of Matthew. The chapter was found by medievalist Grigory Kessel, who used ultraviolet photography on manuscripts in the Vatican Library. The hidden text was found as part of the Sinai Palimpsests Project, where researchers aim to recover texts […]
Don’t Worry, Some Christmas Desserts Aren’t As Naughty As You’d Think
Christmas is a time full of indulgence: desserts with rich chocolate, dripping caramel sauce, and moist cakes (no soggy bottoms, please). In line with the holiday season, one research group found that the Great British Bake Off (GBBO) Christmas desserts are not as naughty as we may have feared. Firstly, why this one television show? […]
Genetic Basis For Problematic Alcohol Use Identified By Extensive Global Multi-Ancestry Study
It’s the holiday season and I am sure many of us will enjoy some extra indulgence over the next week or so. However, for some people, alcohol consumption can lead to problematic behavior and health issues. If you experience problematic alcohol use (PAU), there’s a chance that it’s because of your genes. A new study […]
Five Science “Facts” We Learnt At School That Are Plain Wrong
Let’s start with a quiz… How many senses do you have? Which of the following are magnetic: a tomato, you, paperclips? What are the primary colors of pigments and paints? What region of the tongue is responsible for sensing bitter tastes? What are the states of matter? If you answered five; paperclips; red, yellow, and […]
Who Wrote The Bible?
The Bible tells an overall story about the history of the world: creation, fall, redemption and God’s Last Judgement of the living and the dead. The Old Testament (which dates to 300 BCE) begins with the creation of the world and of Adam and Eve, their disobedience to God and their expulsion from the garden […]
Voyager Has Been Sending Out Signals For Decades. What’s The Soonest We Can Expect A Reply?
In 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 and 2, the spacecraft that have traveled further than any human-made objects, crossing the heliopause and heading into interstellar space. While doing so, the probes have been communicating constantly with Earth, even if Voyager 1 has recently begun sending back repeating patterns of 1s and 0s. It has […]
Is It Possible To Drill A Hole Through The Earth And Come Out The Other Side?
Five years ago, a popular interactive map showed you where you would pop up if you were to dig your way right through the Earth. It’s a bit of fun, even if for the vast majority the answer was “somewhere in an ocean”. But would it be possible to dig through the Earth and pop out […]
How Do You Become An Astronaut? We Spoke To NASA To Find Out
Seeing the Earth from space is an experience like no other. At least, according to the few people who have flown into space and orbited around our little planet. It is a dream shared by many to boldly go where less than 1,000 humans have gone before. For this reason, many apply to be an […]
Sniffing Women’s Tears Lower Male Aggression
Tears in humans are not just for lubrication and the cleaning of the eyes. We shed tears also for emotional reasons. Sadness, joy, anger, or just being moved might lead to crying, but it is not obvious why humans have evolved such a capability. Or if animals could shed emotional tears. Scientists have in the […]
How Does CAPTCHA Tell Robots And Humans Apart?
If you’ve been on the Internet and you aren’t a robot, you’ve probably taken and passed a classic “Are you a robot?” CAPTCHA – and if you’ve failed it, momentarily questioned if you are, in fact, a human. Existential crises aside, the ways these tests work might not be how you’d expect. In a “Completely […]
Artificial Intelligence Could Become Conscious – But It’s Not There Yet
Is artificial intelligence (AI) conscious? Would we even be able to work out if it was? These are some of the questions that researchers in AI and neuroscience are grappling with. There is a lot we don’t know about consciousness, making the quest to understand it in AI so much more complex. A preprint report […]
152-Year-Old Shipwreck Discovered By Father And 4-Year-Old Daughter Duo
Earlier this year, father-daughter duo Tim and Henley Wollak were out boating when they made an unexpected discovery: a 152-year-old shipwreck. The outing started when Henley (aged 4 at the time) wanted to go swimming and look at rocks and sea glass around the southeast shore of Lake Michigan’s Green Island. As her dad wanted […]
Cannibalistic Funerals, Necropants, And A Biological Bomb For A Tomb: 9 Tales From The Darker Side Of Science
Homo sapiens is a complex species and for all our intelligence, we’ve encountered and created some pretty horrifying scenarios. This year we’ve dived into some of the weirdest “cures” we’ve come up with for history’s deadliest diseases (some of which were worse than the disease itself), as well as curious approaches we’ve taken to dealing […]
18 Million Metric Tons Of “White Gold” Sits Beneath California’s Largest Lake
The Salton Sea is a complex body of water that, having been declared an environmental catastrophe in the past, might just be sitting on a tidy billion. The lake itself is the largest in the state of California, but that’s not what scientists are interested in. In a recent report from researchers at Lawrence Berkeley […]
Octopus DNA Reveals Arctic Ice Sheet Could Collapse Sooner Than Expected
It may be odd to think about, but the strangest of the strange creatures, octopuses, may hold information related to Antarctica’s ice sheets. In a new study, scientists have examined the genes of one species of tentacular cephalopods that live in this cold environment, and they have reached some worrying conclusions. According to the paper, […]
Rare Ancient Multiplication Tables Found In 2,300-Year-Old Chinese Tomb
Some incredibly old written multiplication formulas have been unearthed at a mausoleum in central China. While excavating the Qinjiazui site in Hubei Province, archaeologists came across strips of bamboo inscribed with mathematical tables, which are likely to have been recorded more than 2,300 years ago. Announcing the discovery at a press conference, China’s National Cultural […]
The Cowgirl Position: What It Is And What The Risks Are
Just because something is a classic, doesn’t mean everybody has heard of it. You might want to give the cowgirl position a spin in the bedroom (though please dismount before you do) but aren’t quite sure how to get started; you might want an explanation that doesn’t require clicking an “I am over 18” button; […]
Why Are There So Many Units For Cosmic Distances?
There’s a gap between the way scientists usually describe astronomical distances, and the units that make sense to non-astronomers. Space, as Douglas Adams so authoritatively told us, is really big. This means we need big units to describe it. You can measure the distance from Earth to the Andromeda Galaxy in centimeters if you really […]
