A new study has reconstructed anacondas that lived in what’s now Venezuela 12 million years ago. The fossil vertebrae reveal that anacondas were giants back in the Middle to Upper Miocene and have stayed giant ever since, an unusual trend for life on Earth. Most animals that lived between 12.4 to 5.3 million years ago […]
Meet The Malaysian Earthtiger Tarantula: Secretive And Stripy With A Leg Span For Days
The Malaysian earthtiger tarantula was first described in 1891 by respected Swedish arachnologist Tamerlan Thorell. However, confusions around taxonomy have led to little being known about the wild habits of this unique-looking tarantula species. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. Species known […]
Meet The Thresher Shark, A Goofy Predator That Whips Up Cavitation Bubbles To Stun Prey
Thresher sharks are among the goofiest of Chondrichthyes. With big googly eyes, they seem sweet enough at the head end, but their tails? Now they’re all business. Their enormous tails can be 3 meters (10 feet) long, accounting for around half their body length. They look like whips, and they act like whips, creating changes […]
18 Asteroids Passed Earth Closer Than The Moon In November – All Of Them Were Discovered That Month
Looking for Near-Earth objects (NEOs) has demonstrated a simple fact: there are a lot of rocks in space, and many of them come very close to Earth. We have tracked the orbit of all the biggest NEOs, but the smallest ones reflect so little light that our telescopes can only snap when they are close. […]
7th Person Cured Of HIV After Stem Cell Donation Offers Hope Of Expanded Treatment Options
For the seventh time on record, a patient with both HIV and cancer has had the virus eliminated from their body. As in most previous cases, a cure came after the transfer of stem cells designed to address the cancer, rather than the HIV itself. What makes the announcement, coinciding with World AIDS Day, particularly […]
Humans Weren’t Capable Of “Mass Hunting” Until 50,000 Years Ago – What Changed?
Hunting an entire herd of aurochs was no mean feat, and would have required sophisticated levels of cooperation and communication between multiple groups of ancient humans. According to a new study, the organizational skills required to pull off such a massacre were only developed around 50,000 years ago and may have helped Homo sapiens outlive […]
ESA Steps Up Earth Monitoring, As NASA And NOAA Missions Face Uncertain Futures
Studying Earth is built into the world’s space agencies’ directives. After all, Earth is a planet in the Solar System, and, unusually, it harbors life. It is, in fact, the only place in the entire cosmos that humans can live, so the more we know about it and try and secure its future, the better. […]
Yellowstone’s Wolves And The Controversy Racking Ecologists Right Now
But equally striking is the flourishing wildlife. Flora and fauna abound, harkening back to an America not yet touched by colonialist hands: bison roam wild (indeed, sometimes they’re positively livid); grizzly bears are born and live in safety; cougars are… well, the cougars aren’t doing too hot, to be honest, but they’re trying their best. […]
A New Universal Principle Behind Fragmentation Predicts Size Of Any Breakup Debris
Imagine a beautiful vase filled with roses on a spring day, by an open window. A sudden gust of wind enters the room, the roses act as a sail, and the vase tumbles from its perch and onto the floor. The shards of that vase are, of course, a chaos of sizes and shapes. However, […]
Airbus Just Had To Ground 6,000 Of Its Airplanes – Was A Celestial Threat To Blame?
On Friday, several thousand Airbus planes had to be grounded to make sure that their onboard computers would not suffer from unusual but potentially very serious interference. The source of the interference was not even of this Earth – the French company was concerned about the effect of an increase in solar radiation on the […]
Meet Pumuckel, The World’s Shortest Living Horse (And Probably The Cutest Thing You’ll See This Week)
Parks and Rec fans rejoice – L’il Sebastian might be gone (always in our hearts), but we bring to you an even tinier horse to obsess over, with an equally glorious mane and a lovable personality: Pumuckel, the world’s shortest living horse. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or […]
How A 500-Year-Old Inaccurate Bible Is Responsible For The Modern World
Whether or not you believe in the Bible, it’s undeniable that it affects you today. That’s true even for the most ardent atheist out there – and according to a new study from Nathan MacDonald, Professor of the Interpretation of the Old Testament at the University of Cambridge, that’s because of one frankly slightly janky […]
This Newly Discovered Blood Type Is So Rare, Only 3 People In The World Are Known To Have It
Imagine having a blood type so rare that only two other people in the entire world could match it. That’s the reality for three individuals uncovered in a recent study based in Thailand – and they were discovered almost by accident. “We conducted a retrospective review of 285,450 donor and 258,780 patient samples for ABO […]
The Science Of Magic: Find Out More In Issue 41 Of CURIOUS – Out Now
Issue 41 (December 2025) of CURIOUS is out now, bringing you science highlights for the month plus deep dives into intriguing topics, interviews, exclusives, diary dates, and explanations for some of Earth’s most perplexing natural phenomena and landscapes. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the […]
People Sailed To Australia And New Guinea 60,000 years ago
The ancient landmass known as Sahul – which includes Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea – was home to groups of humans as early as 60,000 years ago, according to genetic data. This finding suggests that our ancestors may have made it Down Under just ten millennia or so after first setting foot outside of Africa, […]
How Do Cells Know Their Location And Their Role In The Body?
Each of us has grown out of a tiny group of cells that at one time had the capacity to turn into any component of the body. As we grew, these cells divided and became specialized, but how does a cell know that it needs to become a piece of brain, bone or liver cell, […]
What Are Those Strange Eye “Floaters” You See In Your Vision?
About 76 percent of all non-visually impaired people experience something known as “floaters”. These appear as moving structures, like little worms, that sometimes appear in your field of vision if you are staring at something bright and uniform, such as the sky, snow, or a white screen. The rest of this article is behind a […]
Have We Finally “Seen” Dark Matter? Mysterious Ancient Foot May Be From Our True Ancestor, And Much More This Week
This week, a total of 175 generations of painters created rock art spanning 4,000 years, depicting cyclical time and multiple dimensions. A world-first study has identified five brain “ages”, and we may finally know where pet cats come from – spoiler, it’s not where we thought. Finally, we explore a new vaccine that’s 34.5 percent […]
The Unexpected Life Hiding Out in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is an area of contaminated ocean split between two regions, one off the coast of California and another near Japan. The Patch is not a mountain of tin cans and old tires sitting on the ocean’s surface, but more like a thick soup of millions of plastic particles, trapped in […]
Scientists Detect “Switchback” Phenomenon In Earth’s Magnetosphere For The First Time
The Earth’s magnetosphere is a protective shroud that blocks charged particles and cosmic rays blasted out by the Sun. The four unmanned spacecraft that make up NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMS) have spent nearly a decade studying how the magnetosphere interacts with the Sun’s magnetic field. Now, they have discovered an unusual zigzag in our […]
