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Google has achieved what few brands have, making their company name become the default verb for what their product does. Rather than saying “search it” it’s common to say “Google it” even if the person you are talking to is the type who will Google it on Bing. Advertisement Google didn’t start out as Google. […]

A so-called “mammoth graveyard” in Arctic Siberia has a lot to teach us about how humans and hairy elephant cousins related in the last days of the latter’s existence. Unfortunately, some of the best evidence has been stolen by ivory hunters. Advertisement It is astonishing that humans managed to live in Siberia above the Arctic […]

The speed of light in a vacuum is the absolute speed limit of the universe. As you accelerate towards it, any object with mass suddenly finds it has a lot more of it, and so it takes more and more energy – eventually infinite amounts of energy – in order to move towards it. Advertisement […]

It could be argued that death has become sanitized in some parts of the modern world, a far-removed concept few of us have to face until it happens to someone close, and even then we typically experience grief from a distance to the actual dead. In the Victorian era, the advent of photography brought in […]

Awards season in Hollywood might be over, but the most important competition of the year has just announced its winner – and it looks straight out of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Advertisement The competition in question is New Zealand’s Tree of the Year, and the winner is a uniquely shaped northern rātā, one of the country’s tallest […]

Iceland’s whaling industry is about to face an important decision that could decide its future. Advertisement On Tuesday June 11, the country’s Food Minister Bjarkey Olsen Gunnarsdóttir will announce whether or not it will re-issue a license for Hvalur hf, the only Icelandic whaling company left in business, according to Icelandic broadcasting network RÚV. Advertisement […]

The thermal waters of the iconic Roman Baths in the English city of Bath may hold the key to combating antimicrobial resistance, new research has revealed. After isolating around 300 different microbes living within the famous attraction’s cozy pools, the study authors discovered that 15 of these are capable of inhibiting some of the world’s […]

That birds are dinosaurs is an idea that was suggested, in not so many words, as far back as the mid-19th Century, but their ancestry was delivered in a sucker-punch of a fossil when the world discovered Archaeopteryx in 1861. Since then, evidence of feathered dinosaurs has cropped up in several groups across the planet, but […]

Planetary scientists have discovered something truly unexpected happening above Mars’s highest peaks. The volcanos from the Tharsis region there show traces of frost, but it’s not frozen carbon dioxide like elsewhere on Mars. This frost is actually water ice.   Advertisement Mars has a thin atmosphere made of mostly carbon dioxide, and these extinct volcanos […]

Video games and e-sports continue to rise in popularity across the world, which has led to more and more people of various ages taking up controllers. However, with this surge in popularity and adoption could come some lesser-known problems. For most of us, our gaming habits do not necessarily impact our health – but that […]

In our hunt for technologically advanced alien civilizations out there in the universe, it is useful to think about what sort of signs of life we ourselves give off, such as radio signals and biosignatures.  Advertisement It’s perfectly logical to do so, but it’s not altogether ideal. As we’ve seen over the last few hundred […]

A new explanation for why we have not found dark matter proposes that it doesn’t exist. Instead, the author thinks we have been misunderstanding gravity. He’s not the first to suggest that, but the new proposal, of gravity without mass created by topological defects in space-time, is particularly novel. Advertisement Dark matter was first proposed […]

Names are universal throughout human cultures and across different languages. They form a huge part of our identity and help us communicate with each other, but personal names are considered a uniquely human thing. Now, new research has suggested that wild African elephants could address each other with individual specific calls – the equivalent of […]

Twenty years ago, astronomers used the Spitzer telescope to study Beta Pictoris, a star 63 light-years away. Researchers back then saw a significant amount of dust, shining in infrared. Using Spitzer’s successor, JWST, astronomers looked for the same dust and discovered something exciting: The dust was gone. The research team believe that the dust was […]

Research is showing that many of our contemporary problems, such as the rising prevalence of mental health issues, are emerging from rapid technological advancement and modernisation. A theory that can help explain why we respond poorly to modern conditions, despite the choices, safety and other benefits they bring, is evolutionary mismatch. Advertisement Mismatch happens when […]

In a world first, scientists have literally opened a window into the human brain. They inserted a transparent panel into the skull of a patient and were able to collect high-resolution imaging data through it while the patient was awake and performing tasks, the first time such a feat has been achieved. Advertisement The patient […]

Fresh off the back of “don’t body slam an orca” we’re back with another article about leaving wildlife alone. A rise in wildlife rescue centers taking in dyed birds from gender reveal parties and other events leads us to yet another sentence we can’t believe we have to type: DON’T DYE BIRDS. On March 28, […]

Australia’s first human case of H5N1 bird flu has been confirmed in a 2.5-year-old girl, who has now recovered after being treated in intensive care. The girl is thought to have contracted the virus in India, but it’s the first human case to have been detected on Australian soil. Advertisement In a statement released June […]

A new explanation has been offered for the reflective signals that were once acclaimed as evidence for a lake of liquid water under the ice sheet at the Martian south pole. Without further data, we cannot definitively state the cause of the reflections– but given what else we know, the exciting idea of a subsurface […]

In the opening scenes of 1964’s Goldfinger, James Bond is asked why he always carries a gun. His wry and surprisingly self-deprecating answer? “I have a slight inferiority complex.”  Advertisement It’s a familiar stereotype. Guns, the popular idea says, are a stand-in for penises – and men who own them are probably just overcompensating for […]