Languages evolve over time, prompting a great question: How far back in time could you go and still understand English? If you were to speak to someone from the 1800s, or read a book from the same period, you would likely be fine. Sense and Sensibility (1811) remains comprehensible, for example, with some even claiming […]
New Weight-Loss Drug That Mimics The Effects Of A Workout Shows Promise In Mice
A new weight-loss drug has shown some promising results in mice, sparking hopes it could be developed for use in humans. We’ve heard a lot about these types of drugs recently, but this one works very differently. It doesn’t affect appetite or how much food you eat – instead, it tricks the body into thinking […]
COVID Vaccine mRNA Tech Wins Nobel Prize In Medicine 2023
The winners of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine are Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman. The award was given for discovering “nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.” The prize is worth 11 million Swedish kronor (around 1,002,000 US dollars at the time of publishing), which will […]
Perseverance Spots A Towering Martian Dust Devil In The Distance
On August 30, something moved in the background of a series of images taken by one of the Perseverance Rover’s Navcams. On a planet with no life (at least not large enough to see) and little in the way of meteorological activity, that’s unusual. The movement came from a dust devil seen over a rise […]
The Science Of “Luck”
This article first appeared in Issue 12 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS. Luck, a phenomenon that has fascinated and perplexed humans since time immemorial, has often been attributed to chance, fate, or supernatural forces. But is there more to this supposed phenomenon than mere chance and happenstance? Could there in fact be a rational and […]
Are We Really All Made Of Stardust?
This article first appeared in Issue 12 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS. Carl Sagan said: “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” It’s a quote so unbelievably good it makes you stay up at night to take it all in. But […]
Could Humans Ever Be Fossil Fuels In The Future?
Have you ever considered what will become of our remains in the distant future when we are long dead? We don’t mean in a few decades, or even a few hundred years, we mean eons into the future when the human race may have gone the way of the dinosaurs. Is it possible some of […]
Possible Hints Of Life Found On Distant Planet – How Excited Should We Be?
Data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has shown that an exoplanet around a star in the constellation Leo has some of the chemical markers that, on Earth, are associated with living organisms. But these are vague indications. So how likely is it that this exoplanet harbours alien life? Exoplanets are worlds that orbit […]
Jamais Vu: The Science Behind Eerie Opposite Of Déjà Vu
Repetition has a strange relationship with the mind. Take the experience of déjà vu, when we wrongly believe have experienced a novel situation in the past – leaving you with an spooky sense of pastness. But we have discovered that déjà vu is actually a window into the workings of our memory system. Our research […]
NASA Opens Lid Of Asteroid Sample Capsule, Preserved Proteins Found After Millions Of Years In Dinosaur Feather, And Much More This Week
This week we turn to science for the answer to how long couples should wait before getting intimate, rare red auroras caused by the Sun ripping holes in Earth’s magnetic field, and the zoo hypothesis attempts to explain why aliens haven’t made contact. Finally, we speak to wildlife filmmaker Bertie Gregory about the highlights from […]
Top Chinese Scientist Says India Did Not Land At The Lunar South Pole
In August, India became the fourth nation to touch down on the Moon, and the first to land near the lunar south pole. Since touching down, the lander and rover have conducted experiments to measure the temperature at the landing site and analyze the composition of the lunar soil, before – perhaps for good – […]
Exceptional 3,000-Year-Old Arrow With A Quartzite Head Recovered From Melting Ice
Archaeologists with the Secrets of the Ice project have discovered an ancient arrow that was preserved in ice for 3,000 years. The specimen displays its quartzite head, the fibers used to fasten it to the shaft, and the arrow’s feather fletching. It is a remarkable find. The Secrets of the Ice project is run by […]
How An Engraving Of A Bicycle Ended Up In An Ancient Indian Temple
If you’ve spent too long on YouTube or have a relative who has a soft spot for forwarding misinformation on WhatsApp, you may have come across a strange carving of a person riding a bicycle in an ancient Indian temple. According to various posts, the sculpture shows that humans in ancient India were riding around […]
Highest-Energy Detection Of Quantum Entanglement Achieved Yet
CERN’s ATLAS experiment has measured the quantum entanglement of top quarks, the most massive fundamental particles, at the highest energy yet, 12 orders of magnitudes (one trillion times) higher than standard entanglement experiments. Quantum entanglement is a property that we do not experience at our level of reality. It is very much in the domain […]
Cosmic Web Seen Directly For First Time Without Needing The Light Of Quasars
Every galaxy and cluster of galaxies is connected to the others by the cosmic web. Streams of gas stretch across the universe, where the most massive clusters form nodes. The structure is extremely faint and everything known about it comes from using quasars as a light source. The gas in the cosmic web filters some […]
Ancient Roman Political Slogans And A Final Sacrifice Found In Pompeii House
Archaeologists in Pompeii have discovered political inscriptions on the walls of a house in Pompeii. Inscriptions of this type, first carved and then painted in red (porpora), are common on the outside walls of houses and shops in the ancient city, and even on millstones. However, this is the first time they have been found […]
Motty Was The World’s Only Known Inter-Species Elephant Hybrid
Motty is the only confirmed example of a hybrid between the African elephant (Loxodonta africana) and the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus). While the young calf unexpectedly died less than two weeks after his birth, he managed to secure the unusual position of Guinness World Records’ “world’s rarest elephant”. Motty was born on July 11, 1978, at […]
The Dark Reason Why You Never See Narwhals In An Aquarium
There’s an extremely slim chance you have ever seen a narwhal in an aquarium – and for good reason. In North America, there have been only two attempts to keep narwhals in captivity, both of which ended in calamity and tragedy. Narwhals are a truly unusual species of toothed whales that live in the icy […]
Microbiologist Reveals The Things (And Places Where) They Never Eat
Every year, around 2.4 million people in the UK get food poisoning – mostly from viral or bacterial contamination. Most people recover within a few days without treatment, but not all are that lucky. As a microbiologist, I’m probably more acutely aware of the risk of food-borne infections than most. Here are some of the […]
Nova, Supernova, Hypernova, Kilonova – What’s The Difference?
The word nova comes from “nova stella”, Latin for “new star”, the name Tycho Brahe gave to the sudden appearance in 1572 of a light in the sky where none had been seen before. For centuries thereafter every sudden appearance of a new star in the sky was called a nova. Since we have learned […]
