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Being a human being is exhausting. You’re responsible for ensuring you take in the right amount of food and water, and then you’ve got to deal with the consequences of it coming out the other end. It’s a panic that leads many of us to habitually pee every time we’re about to leave the house, […]

Unless it happens to contain your birthday, we’re willing to bet that January is probably not your favorite month. The holiday fun is over, but the Northern Hemisphere winter has barely begun, and for many of us that means several more weeks of dark nights and bad weather. Oh, and another thing: it’s the peak […]

Frogs are pretty impressive little creatures – but they don’t always tend to have accuracy and physics on their side when it comes to locomotion. By looking at the cricket frog, researchers have discovered the secrets to their strange locomotion, and it has all to do with some high-speed bellyflops. Advertisement Cricket frogs (Acris crepitans) […]

Almost 200 years ago, the Sun looked as if it had turned a strange color, ushering in two years of freakishly cool weather across the globe. Scientists have long believed that the strange effect was caused by an eruption, but they’ve never been able to pinpoint the responsible volcano – until now. Advertisement It’s known […]

An interdisciplinary team of researchers has found that a skull long thought to belong to Arsinoë IV, the sister of Cleopatra, actually belonged to a young boy. The results show that the individual was probably between 11 and 14 when he died, and he may have had a pathological developmental disorder. But while the study […]

There’s a recipe from Rome and its surroundings that is deceptively simple and sinfully delicious. It has three ingredients (plus a secret one): Pasta, pecorino cheese, and pepper. Together, these ingredients make Pasta cacio e pepe, a delicious, creamy dish that is truly a marvel of Italian cuisine. Advertisement However, as we said, it is […]

Researchers at ETH Zurich have found traces of arsenic in particulate matter, clouds, and rainwater. Using new optimized measurement techniques, they have identified various ways that the toxic substance is transported into the atmosphere. Among these is a surprising route that involves previously underappreciated biological processes. Advertisement Arsenic is a naturally occurring but highly toxic […]

This week on Break It Down: unexpected and unexplained structures have been discovered hiding under the Pacific Ocean, the oldest equatorial dinosaur fossil in the world dates back a whopping 230 million years, a painted dog penis bone has been found in a ritual shaft in England (some puns write themselves), cave art from France […]

We’ve all heard some variation of this rumor: the average person “eats” eight spiders a year. And this isn’t a reference to the FDA’s standards for bug bits in food – this delicacy purportedly comes courtesy of the critters themselves, who apparently offer themselves up freely by crawling into our mouths as we sleep. We […]

The renowned physicist Richard Feynman is reputed to have once said that “physics is to math what sex is to masturbation”. Exactly what comparison he was making, he didn’t clarify – but if the orgasm gap is anything to go by, he presumably meant that math is often more fun, more effective, and better at […]

A cave shelter near Paris already known to host unique Palaeolithic art also appears to hold a three-dimensional map or model of the area around it, two archaeologists have claimed. If true, this would likely make it the oldest known representation of its kind, and certainly unmatched in scale from the era. Advertisement The caves […]

In the quest to find the world’s oldest ice, scientists have successfully drilled a 2,800-meter (9,186-foot) long ice core, reaching where the Antarctic ice sheet meets bedrock. The incredible feat reveals a continuous record of Earth’s climate that dates back at least 1.2 million years. Advertisement The ice core was obtained from a remote site […]

The US Space Force’s mysterious X-37B space plane has been orbiting Earth non-stop for just over a year. Doing what? That remains unclear, though its masters have disclosed some of its activities in 2024. Advertisement X-37B blasted off on its latest mission on December 28, 2023, quietly surpassing the 365-day mark without any official announcement […]

Quick! Think of a color. Now think of a number between one and 10. What did you choose? Advertisement If a common factoid is to be believed, the answer is most likely “blue” and “seven”. And we know what you’re thinking: that there must be some kind of confirmation bias at play here; that huge […]

As wildfires continued to rage on the outskirts of Los Angeles and beyond on Wednesday, California Governor Gavin Newsom said in a video posted to social media: “This time of year traditionally has not been fire season but now, we disabuse any notion that there is a season, it’s year-round in the state of California.” […]

When we consider 3D space, there are only two classes of particles: bosons and fermions, each having unique features that make them stand apart. But the universe can get a bit weirder – certain interactions between particles behave like a particle themselves, and we call them quasiparticles. Researchers have discovered a whole new class of […]

The animal kingdom can get pretty weird when it comes to sex and relationships. Different creatures have evolved all sorts of methods to pass on their genes to the next generation and beat out competitors in the process. For the Japanese rice fish, researchers have discovered that it’s all about how many times a day the […]

Mammalian ears are pretty damn strange. For humans, they’re a bit unsightly, they’re made of cartilage yet somehow sneak in three bones, and they get bigger as we age. Now, we’ve got a new weird ear fact to add to the list: they started out as gills. Our ears used to be gills? The outer […]

One of the largest collections of human and animal bones ever seen in a Roman feature in Britain has been discovered inside a ritual shaft at an ancient chalk quarry. Located in Surrey, southeast England, the 2,000-year-old pit contains the remains of 21 people as well as a dog penis bone that appears to have […]

A bunch of evidence has shown that ketamine could be used in therapy for depression, although how it achieves this remains somewhat unclear. In a new study, tiny zebrafish suffering from a sense of exhaustion and futility might provide some clues. Advertisement Ketamine is often half-jokingly called a “horse tranquilizer” because of its use in […]