When Dr Ana Gracanin of the Australian National University placed an infrared camera inside a large tree hollow used by greater gliders as a nest, she didn’t expect to see the glider father delivering food to the young. Even more surprising was the way he did it, with tasty stems wrapped in the doting father’s […]
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Olympus Mons: The Biggest Volcano In The Solar System Makes Mount Everest Look Like A Hillock
Mount Everest, one of the go-to examples of a “thing that is large”, looks like a tiny hillock in comparison to other mountains of the Solar System. While Everest stands at 8,849 meters (29,032 feet) tall, the two tallest mountains orbiting the Sun reach over 20,000 meters (65,600 feet) in elevation. The second-tallest mountain structure […]
DARPA Sends Energy Wirelessly Over 8.6 Kilometers, Setting A New World Record
The US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has set a new distance record for wireless energy transfer, sending more than 800 watts of power to a receiver 8.6 kilometers (5.3 miles) away. Ever since the days of Nikola Tesla, humans have looked into the idea of wireless power transfer (WPT), the transfer of […]
“Anomalous” Radio Pulses Detected In Antarctica Are Coming From Underneath The Ice
A particle detector flying above Antarctica has detected highly unusual radio pulses coming from beneath the ice. The Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) experiment floats a range of instruments above Antarctica using a stratospheric balloon. The experiment is aimed at detecting cosmic neutrinos, tiny particles which only interact via gravity and the weak force, originating […]
Sharing Cute Animal Pics With Your Pals Might Actually Serve An Important Purpose
Is your group chat dominated by the likes of Moo Deng and Pesto? Perhaps the only way your dad uses Instagram is to send you multiple reels of puppies and kittens. A lot of us send content like this without really thinking about it – but it could be helping to strengthen relationships and foster […]
Solar Eclipses On Command? That’s Now A Reality
Total solar eclipses are not just incredible celestial events. They are also important scientific moments that allow scientists to study the solar corona, the incredibly hot atmosphere of the Sun, probing its behavior. But solar eclipses do not happen every day, so the European Space Agency (ESA) decided to start making artificial eclipses using the […]
First-Of-Its-Kind GPS Data Reveals Egret’s Incredible 38-Hour, Non-Stop Flight From Australia To Papua New Guinea
An egret that clearly had places to be stunned scientists conducting what they believe to be the first-ever GPS tracking study of these large waterbirds in Australia. Data revealed that the bird took off from Australia and clocked 38 hours in the air without stopping before landing in Papua New Guinea – a journey that […]
Meet The Pearlfish That Calls Sea Cucumbers’ Butts Home And Can Reverse Park Into Tight Spaces
The pearlfish is famous for its hiding skills. A small, slender, and scaleless fish, it’s a bit defenceless out in the ocean, but it’s found a unique way to survive the dangers of the day: it lives inside the buttholes of sea cucumbers. “You see, the underdogs, they know that in the game of life […]
10 Teeny Tiny Chevrotains: Meet The Smallest Hoofed Mammals On Earth
A group of teeny tiny mouse-deer in the family Tragulidae numbers 10 species that live in warmer parts of Southeast Asia, India, and Africa. They are small, delicate, and extremely elusive: they are the chevrotains. Technically, these animals are neither related to mice nor deer, instead existing in their own taxonomic family (Tragulidae). However, like […]
Lab-Grown Salmon Receives FDA Approval In The US, The First Cultivated Seafood To Do So
Cultured salmon cells are the latest lab-grown food to pass a pre-market safety consultation by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It’s the fourth cultivated meat to receive this green light and the first seafood to do so. The product comes from Californian start-up Wildtype, which has spent years working on a way to […]
Sharks Have To Keep Swimming, Or Else They’ll Die? Well, No, Not Really
It’s a metaphor beloved by the wheeliest of dealers: a shark, they tell us, has to keep on moving, or else they’ll die. But is that true? Or is it just a bunch of chum? Well, turns out it’s a bit of both. “The short answer is it depends,” marine conservation biologist David Shiffman told […]
Massive Urns Containing Human And Turtle Remains Found Buried In The Amazon
When a tree fell in a remote region of the Brazilian Amazon, local villagers noticed something big and very strange lurking beneath its exposed roots. A team of archaeologists arrived shortly afterwards and revealed that the buried objects were in fact ancient funerary urns containing pre-Hispanic human and animal skeletons. A total of seven urns […]
South American Forests Are Still Missing Their Mastodons 10,000 Years Later
Distributing seeds is among plants’ key challenges, and many have turned to animals for help. However, some get over-reliant on a single species or a few similar ones, with dire consequences when these go extinct. A live demonstration is happening in the biodiversity hotspot of Central Chile where plants with fruits that were once distributed […]
Why We Still Can’t Find A Solar System Twin
The Copernican principle is an important concept in astronomy. It states that Earth and humanity cannot have a special or privileged position in the universe. But looking at the Solar System and at the currently known star systems out there in the galaxy, we immediately spot a discrepancy: there is nothing that looks remotely close […]
Video: Humans Bred With Neanderthals
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First-Ever Footage Of Sun’s South Pole, What’s Up With The NB.1.8.1 COVID-19 Variant? And Much More This Week
This week, the first-ever sauropod stomach fossil shows they didn’t chew their food, a new study of 14,000-year-old Ice Age puppies preserved in permafrost reveals they’re actually wolves, and this new map of the universe is the deepest yet, reaching back 13.5 billion years into the past. Finally, will granting “Mother Nature” legal rights really […]
How Many People Survived The Titanic?
Around 2,223 passengers and crew boarded the Titanic on its maiden voyage in April 1912, but only 706 survived when the ship sank in one of the worst peacetime maritime disasters in history. That means approximately 1,517 people perished in the infamous incident. The Titanic has been the focus of countless reports, studies, documentaries, books, […]
With Quantum Entanglement And Blockchain, We Can Finally Generate Real Random Numbers
God, Albert Einstein famously declared, does not play dice. It’s a pithy statement, but a revealing one: to the famously genius physicist, true randomness – and the new quantum framework that threatened to once again rewrite the rules of the universe – was anathema. Well, no offence to Einstein, but he was dead wrong on […]
Atmospheric Rivers Over Antarctica Could Double By 2100 Due To Climate Change
With our planet’s changing climate seeing increased levels of moisture in the atmosphere, new research using climate simulations has suggested that this could have a significant impact on Antarctica, with the continent predicted to experience twice as many extreme “atmospheric river” weather events by the end of the century. Atmospheric rivers are often described […]
Ice Age Puppies, Sauropod’s Last Supper, And A First Look At The Sun’s Butt
This week on Break It Down: Seeing the Sun’s south pole for the first time ever, Ice Age puppies frozen in permafrost turn out to be wolves, a world-first fossil discovery reveals a sauropod’s final meal, “razor blade throat” and a traveling nimbus reveal what to expect from the new COVID variant, the deepest map […]