News

Until not many years ago, scientists didn’t think planets could exist around a pair of stars. The complications from the three-body problem would make most of them unstable. Yet, we’ve found plenty of binary systems with planets. And it seems that they can get weirder and weirder. The system ʋ Octantis (pronounced nu Octantis) should […]

Lack of sleep can be seriously injurious to one’s health, but it’s not just hours a night that matter; quality sleep is important too. Sleep experts have long warned that snoozing after an alarm doesn’t give you what you need, but a new study shows we’re not taking their advice. Ideally, none of us would […]

In the Gobi desert lives one of the rarest animals on Earth. Known in Mongolian as the Mazaalai, the Gobi bear (Ursus arctos gobiensis) is the rarest of the planet’s eight bear species. As Sir David Attenborough said in the BBC series Asia, “They are so rarely seen they were thought to be a myth.” […]

As the most massive planet in the Solar System, and first to form, Jupiter’s gravity shaped the formation of everything else. To better understand how the newborn giant threw its weight around, astrophysicists have attempted to model its early years and have come to some surprising conclusions. Professor Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of […]

Researchers from a bunch of US government agencies recently published the results of the first-ever “Space Weather Tabletop Exercise” to assess their preparedness for a severe solar storm. It turns out, we’re woefully unprepared for such an event.  To sum up, an intense geomagnetic storm has the potential to spark regional-scale blackouts, radio communications outages, […]

The Chicago Archaeopteryx is a remarkable fossil, the “best preserved” of its kind, in fact. That’s according to palaeontologist Prof Jingmai O’Connor, who’s something of an expert in the transition that saw theropods morph into birds, and here Archaeopteryx is key. The oldest known fossil bird, it lived during the Late Jurassic 150 million years […]

Regular geometrical shapes are such a common feature in human civilizations that we often don’t realize that they are not that common in nature. But then you see a perfect sphere of plasma in the depths of space, and, well, that is certainly strange. An international team of astronomers led by Professor Miroslav Filipović from […]

Modern life. What a mess, eh? The horrors persist, but so do we, and might I inspire just a little bit of relief: at least we’re not living in the timeline where every major surgery was a world-first. There has to be a first time for everything, and when it comes to carving up the […]

You know how sometimes you can spend ages thinking about a problem, and then suddenly, the answer just clicks? These moments of insight are super-satisfying, but it turns out they can also reveal really important things about how our brains hold onto memories, as a new study from scientists in the US and Germany has […]

Are you a bear? An owl? A lion? A dolphin, maybe? No, this isn’t some weird knock-off Sorting Hat quiz – we’re asking about your chronotype. It’s a fundamental piece of your biology, but for some reason, we tend to think of it in terms of animals – or, worse, as evidence of laziness or […]

Chinese scientists report the discovery of a new strain of bacteria that exists only inside the Tiangong Space Station. The new microbe has been called Niallia Tiangongensis; it is related to the human pathogen Niallia circulans, which is linked to wound infections, and is usually soil-dwelling. Well, from humble beginnings to the stars. The Chinese […]

Humpback whales don’t always give birth in the tropics, as had previously been thought. Sometimes the calves come during their epic migration, and have to complete the journey in their mother’s slipstream. In fact, new observations reveal, these births can occur as far south as Tasmania or New Zealand, leaving the newborns to swim thousands […]

Researchers have built the USA’s most powerful laser yet, so powerful that the only way to describe its power is to compare it to the world’s annual consumption of electricity. The instrument, called ZEUS, is hoped to have applications in a variety of fields, from medicine to astrophysics. ZEUS is the first official experiment that […]

There’s a pretty big variety in the bird world. From tiny wrens and goldfinches to flightless species like ostriches and powerful swimmers like gannets, the birds of planet Earth have a lot of niches covered. However, there is only one bird species that can truly fly backwards.  Hummingbirds are famous for being pretty; in fact, […]

A tomb discovered within an elite necropolis in Pompeii has been identified as the final resting place of an ancient priestess who may have served the fertility goddess Ceres. According to archaeologists, this is the first grave ever to be connected to the cult of Ceres in the doomed city, and the woman whose ashes […]

Just over 90 million years ago, a prehistoric giant went extinct. Longer than Tyrannosaurus rex, and considerably taller, Spinosaurus was one of the largest theropod dinosaurs ever to stamp across the planet, but unless you count that time we heard a ringtone coming out of one’s belly in Jurassic Park III, we’ve never really got […]

While photographing the auroras during a geomagnetic storm, Mike Lewinski caught sight of something extraordinary: a brilliant white beam of light tearing through the night sky. He was shooting from the quiet town of Crestone, Colorado, on May 16, as a moderate geomagnetic storm rippled across the Northern Hemisphere. Celestial events like this occur when […]

Welcome back to the world of differently colored animals. From 1-in-100,000 coloring found on an elk, to gorgeous white stingarees floating along the seafloor, the animal world can sure throw a spanner in the works when it comes to “typical” coloration. Now the latest creature to join the party is a diamondback rattlesnake, without the diamonds. The […]

Sand dredging off the coast of Java has recovered more than 6,000 bones, including two fragments of skulls of the early humans Homo erectus. H. erectus and the other animals found there lived on territory long since swallowed by the sea. The finds refute the idea that early humans were isolated on Indonesian islands, showing […]