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This week on Break It Down: a new study has become the first to document what sound a shark makes, Neptune has been confirmed to have an aurora thanks to the best telescope ever, a pipeline construction site turned up the terrifying claw of a new species of therizinosaur, why people are trying to prevent […]

Last weekend, on March 22, the Arctic Sea reached its maximum coverage of ice for the winter season and it is the lowest since satellite records began 47 years ago. The sea ice covered 14.33 million square kilometers  (5.53 million square miles), about 1.3 million square kilometers (506,000 square miles) below the 1981-2010 average. That […]

Spring has well and truly sprung in the Northern Hemisphere, and while that might see more of us reaching for the antihistamines as the blooms bring pollen, hay fever isn’t the only thing to be cautious of. In the US, some bears are beginning to come out of hibernation, and that means it’s time to […]

Imagine, if you will, two glasses of water, identical in all respects but one: their temperature. One contains hot water; the other, cold. You put both in the freezer. Which ices up first? ADVERTISEMENT The answer seems obvious, right? It’s gotta be the cold glass – the water inside has fewer degrees to drop. And […]

Microsoft founder and billionaire Bill Gates was on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon in February and made some bold predictions for the future and the role that artificial intelligence (AI) might play in it. The comments have recently making the rounds online – and there are a lot of feelings surrounding them. ADVERTISEMENT Gates […]

The animal world is always full of surprises. Even a long-studied species can hold a few secrets hidden between their fur or scales. From the sounds sharks make to the hunting habits of cuttlefish, there is always something new to discover. Now researchers may have stumbled upon a rare case of bird mimicry inside a […]

Humans are clever things. We’re inventors, artists, scientists, and so much more, but despite our incredible achievements, we’re still pretty dumb when we want to be. Our brains are evolutionarily and psychologically predisposed to make certain fallacies when it comes to our thinking, and a common one relates to the subtle difference between causation and […]

There could be a pantry invader hiding in your rice and you wouldn’t know it. The crafty rice weevil can get into bags of rice in its larval form, tucked safely inside a grain as it develops. ADVERTISEMENT Rice weevils aren’t especially uncommon, and even if you did eat them nothing bad would happen. They […]

The early history of European colonization of America is often romanticized, but this is far from the messy truth. In reality, colonization was achieved by rival groups of settlers with competing agendas, ideologies, and religious beliefs. As these groups jostled for control, conflicts were bound to occur, and they were just as petty as many […]

COVID-19 appears to be associated with a substantial rise in the number of ME/CFS cases, according to a new study. Using data from a long COVID research initiative run by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the scientists calculated that the incidence of ME/CFS is now 15 times higher than pre-pandemic levels, and found […]

A 2,000-year-old Maya burial in Belize has revealed some wild insights into the nature of pre-Hispanic removals. By identifying the remains of two non-local individuals, a researcher suggests that these bones may have been packed up and relocated when the site’s inhabitants first moved in, in an attempt to infuse their new house with the […]

Dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago (well, apart from those feathered ones still alive today), but despite the incredible age of their fossils, we do find soft tissues intact. These mummified samples have provided snapshots into everything from dietary preferences to how dinosaurs had sex. ADVERTISEMENT Impressive stuff, but wouldn’t it be great if […]

Geoscientists have used earthquakes to study the composition of the lower portion of the Earth’s mantle under the Pacific Ocean – and they’ve discovered something quite peculiar. There are zones where the seismic waves move in different ways, suggesting structures that are colder or have a different composition than the surrounding molten rocks. The team […]

On the Faroe Islands, there is a space program different from all others. Its aim is not to leave Earth and head into space, but to venture out into the depths of the Atlantic to harness a renewable energy source that originates from space, right here on Earth. Staggeringly, over 80 percent of global energy […]

One of the most sensational Biblical-era structures ever discovered in the Judean Desert has just been announced by a team of Israeli archaeologists. Aided by citizen scientist volunteers, the researchers have located an enormous pyramid that dates back to the Ptolemaic era, when Israel was ruled by a dynasty of pharaohs. ADVERTISEMENT “What we have […]

Don’t underestimate the centipede – and never, ever call them an insect. Often shunned for being the creepiest of all crawlies, these many-legged masterpieces have a strange and unique evolutionary history that’s full of surprises.  ADVERTISEMENT Taxonomically speaking, centipedes are not insects. Insects – like beetles, bees, ants, and many, many others – belong to […]

Mighty mountain ranges can be found on every continent, yet the longest continuous chain of peaks is not located on any of these seven landmasses. Instead, the world’s most extensive range lies at the bottom of the sea, according to the NOAA. ADVERTISEMENT Known as the mid-ocean ridge system, it consists of a continuous range […]

A new study using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile has taken a look at the Lupus molecular cloud complex, one of the closest and largest low-mass star-forming regions in the Southern Hemisphere. There they found 73 protoplanetary disks to examine in closer detail, finding that these planet-forming rings of dust and gas […]

According to the results of a massive new synthesis study of over 2,000 publications, which leaves no room for ambiguity or doubt: humans are driving substantive and devastating biodiversity loss across the planet. ADVERTISEMENT Even though scientists have been collecting evidence of human impacts on biodiversity for decades, the overall trajectory of biodiversity in a […]

The great thing about having telescopes that can look further and further into the past is being surprised by what we see there.  ADVERTISEMENT With the infrared JWST, we were hoping to learn more about the formation of galaxies, as well as clear up mysteries about how supermassive black holes became so large. But we […]