A German-Polish team of scientists managed to capture the first-ever video recording of a space-time crystal, helping to illuminate some potential applications for these curious objects. A crystal is, by definition, a material whose constituents are arranged in a lattice, a highly ordered microscopic structure. A time crystal is the same but the order is […]
Trinitite Is Atomic Rock Forged By The Fireballs Of Nuclear Bombs
If you want to make trinitite, all you need is a few things: a bucket of sand and the intense heat of a thermonuclear weapon. Scientists first noticed this strange green-red glass after dropping some of the very first atomic bombs in the dying days of War World Two. As it turned out, this material […]
Why Sitting With Crossed Legs Could Be Bad For You
Are you sitting comfortably? Just pause for a moment and without adjusting, notice your posture. What are your legs doing? Are they crossed? And are you a right or left crosser? Some 62 percent of people cross right over left, 26 percent go the other way and 12 percent have no preference. There are typically […]
In US First, Utah Kids Are Banned From Social Media Unless Their Parents Consent
Utah children and teens will require parental consent before joining social media platforms, a new law has ruled, making the state the first in the nation to pass such legislation. Under 18s will need permission to use apps such as TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook, and will face an overnight curfew, unless this is adjusted by […]
Frozen Bubbles Form In Canada’s Abraham Lake
This article first appeared in Issue 6 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS. If you can brave the freezing temperatures of Abraham Lake in January, you’ll be rewarded with one of nature’s great curiosities as you walk above thousands of frozen bubbles. The diaphanous spheres are beautiful, but they also pack a punch, formed from […]
Gold Literally Grows On Trees In Australia
Gold hunters need only consult the trees if they want to track down some of that sweet Au. Why? Because when certain trees strike gold with their roots, the chemical element ends up in their leaves. It seems in Australia, gold quite literally grows on trees. The gold leaves are found on eucalyptus trees that […]
There’s A Jellyfish In The Ocean That Looks Just Like A Fried Egg
This article first appeared in Issue 6 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS. A lot of money has gone into blasting off to space of late, but if your astronomical interest piques at the prospect of alien life, you needn’t look any further than Earth’s oceans for some wacky species. Case in point: the fried […]
Misophonia, The Hatred Of Specific Noises, Is Way More Common Than We Thought
Crunch. Chew. Slurp. Are you getting goosebumps? Feeling stressed or angry? Fighting the urge to close this article altogether? You may be experiencing misophonia – a condition where certain sounds provoke an extreme negative reaction. Misophonia is little-known, but it’s more prevalent than you may think: according to a study published today, nearly one in five […]
The Entomologist Who Grew Botfly Larvae In His Arm, And Filmed It
From the doctor who pumped hydrogen gas into his own anus to save lives, to the surgeon who inserted a catheter into his own heart after fighting a doctor, history is replete with people willing to experiment on themselves in order to advance science and medicine. When you aren’t working in medicine, the self-sacrifice can […]
Does Eating A Fig Always Involve Eating Dead Wasps? Yes And No
If you like figs then it could be argued that you have a taste for wasps. The relationship between figs and fig wasps is arguably the most interdependent pollination symbiosis known to science, and it ends with a lot of dead wasps going missing inside figs. By the time you come to eat the fig […]
Google And Bing’s AI Chatbots Appear To Be Citing Each Other’s Lies
Bing’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot appears to have cited lies originally made by Google’s rival chatbot Bard, in a worrying example of how misinformation could be spread by the new large language models. It’s been a tough week for AI chatbots, so it’s probably a good thing they don’t have feelings. Google launched its new […]
The Multiverse: How We’re Tackling The Challenges Facing The Theory
The idea of a multiverse consisting of “parallel universes” is a popular science fiction trope, recently explored in the Oscar-winning movie Everything Everywhere All At Once. However, it is within the realm of scientific possibility. It is important to state from the start that the existence (or not) of the multiverse is a consequence of […]
China Plans World’s Largest “Ghost Particle” Detector 1 Kilometer Under The Ocean
Plans to build a detector deep under the ocean to try and catch the most elusive particles in the world, neutrinos, have been announced by The Chinese Academy of Sciences. They are not the only ones: Work is currently underway to build three detectors in the Mediterranean Sea, one has been proposed off the coast […]
Volunteers Are Transcribing The Notebooks Of Scientist Who Inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829) is usually remembered as the inventor of a revolutionary miner’s safety lamp. But his wild popularity came as much from his influence on popular culture as it did from his contributions to chemistry and applied science. In the first few years of the 19th century, there was no hotter spectacle in […]
Massive Hole In Sun’s Atmosphere Cracked Open And Auroras Are Coming
A major coronal hole has opened up in the Sun’s atmosphere and is now pointing almost straight at us. Such events are usually associated with an increase in solar wind speed and interplanetary magnetic field strength. If the location on the Sun is right, this can lead to geomagnetic storms and auroral activity as the […]
Abandoned and Unloved, A Stone Giant Lies On The Island Of Naxos
If you snoop around the Greek island of Naxos, you might stumble across a rock statue quietly sleeping in a marble quarry. He’s known as the Kouros of Apollonas. Although he may look a bit like an Easter Island Moai statue, it’s believed this unfinished sculpture actually depicts a bearded Greek god. The Kouros of […]
The Largest Silver Nugget Ever Found Weighed More Than An American Bison
Gold might represent first place, be pooped out by bacteria, and be the plot line of every major treasure hunt movie, but silver might just have it pipped to the post when it comes to the largest nugget ever found. Back in the 1860s, silver was found in Aspen, Colorado, USA. Of all the silver […]
How Ancient Greek Philosophers And Mythology Saw The End Of The World
In more recent times, our visions of the end of the world have ranged from the quite drastic threat of the climate crisis and nuclear war to imagining artificial intelligence absorbing and replacing us. Before that, there were biblical tales of angels pouring their bowels upon the Earth, turning the seas to blood, and the […]
A Colossal Ecosystem Teeming With Life Is Below Earth’s Surface
Beneath your feet in the depths of our planet, there’s an unbelievably vast ecosystem teeming with life. In recent years, a massive international team of scientists revealed how billions upon billions of microorganisms live miles beneath Earth’s subsurface. Presenting their work at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in 2018, the researchers calculated the size […]
Ancient 3,500-Year-Old Bronze Hand Is A Mystery To Archaeologists
Back in 2017, archaeologists in Switzerland come across a truly baffling, yet potentially very important, discovery buried within an ancient grave: a 3,500-year-old bronze hand with a gold cuff around the wrist. It was the first and only time an object like this has ever been unearthed in this part of Europe, so the researchers […]
