While knowing the name of the largest lake currently on Earth might win you a couple of points at a pub quiz (spoilers, it’s the Caspian Sea), the largest lake ever to exist on Earth puts all the other inland water bodies to shame. So vast was this area that it has now been awarded […]
Candles Made Of Chicks Was A Rare But Real Practice In The North Atlantic
What’s the weirdest way you’ve ever illuminated a dark evening? Torch on your head? Stick of fire? If a candle made of a storm petrel chick isn’t on your list, you’ve barely dipped your toe into the world of weird ways of getting around. The grim, rare, but real practice, is the subject of a […]
Asteroids In The Solar System Could Contain Undiscovered, Superheavy Elements
For centuries, the quest for new elements was a driving force in many scientific disciplines. Understanding an atom’s structure and the development of nuclear science allowed scientists to accomplish the old goal of alchemists – turning one element into another. Over the past few decades, scientists in the United States, Germany, and Russia have figured […]
Massive Planet Too Big For Its Own Sun Pushes Astronomers To Rethink Exoplanet Formation
Imagine you’re a farmer searching for eggs in the chicken coop – but instead of a chicken egg, you find an ostrich egg, much larger than anything a chicken could lay. That’s a little how our team of astronomers felt when we discovered a massive planet, more than 13 times heavier than Earth, around a […]
Earth’s Early Magma Oceans Detected In 3.7 Billion Year-Old Greenland Rocks
Earth hasn’t always been a blue and green oasis of life in an otherwise inhospitable solar system. During our planet’s first 50 million years, around 4.5 billion years ago, its surface was a hellscape of magma oceans, bubbling and belching with heat from Earth’s interior. The subsequent cooling of the planet from this molten state, […]
Understanding Survivor Bias: The Revealing Story Of A Bullet-Riddled Plane And A Helmet
The longer you stay on Facebook, the closer the chance of you seeing a “we didn’t have seatbelts/safety features/basic concerns for our survival needs when I was a child and we still survived” post gets to 100 percent. If you haven’t encountered them, think of the person who tells you “my gran smoked every day of her […]
What’s The Point Of Giving Gifts? An Anthropologist Explains This Ancient Part Of Being Human
Have you planned out your holiday gift giving yet? If you’re anything like me, you might be waiting until the last minute. But whether every single present is already wrapped and ready, or you’ll hit the shops on Christmas Eve, giving gifts is a curious but central part of being human. While researching my new […]
The Historical Traditions Of Christmas Past
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 […]
