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The Solar System condensed out of a vast cloud of gas, seeded with heavier elements by exploding stars, somewhere between 4.5 and 4.6 billion years ago. That’s enough detail for most purposes, but if you want a more precise age, it’s good to consider what part of the Solar System you are referring to. The […]

Get ready for the Blood Moon next week! Our natural satellite will turn crimson as it is experiencing a total eclipse. It will happen during the evening between September 7 and 8 (depending on the timezone) and will be seen by an enormous number of people worldwide. The moon will first go black as the […]

Strap in kids, we’re going full goblin mode with one of the world’s weirdest sharks: the goblin shark. Known to science as Mitsukurina owstoni, it was first discovered in 1898, deep in the waters off Japan. Today, they still lurk in the darkest pockets of the ocean at depths of 250 to over 900 meters […]

Earth’s history is divided up into different geological wedges of time, wedges we like to call things like epochs, periods, and eons. They’re defined by events that shaped the planet (think big extinctions and biodiversity booms), and it’s generally been accepted that the boundaries between them are randomly distributed.  The rest of this article is […]

Yes, some fish do have a sleep-like state, although the brain activity is different from that of humans and other mammals. Can it truly be considered sleep? It depends on your definition, but it is evident that many fish enter a resting, semi-dormant state that appears to have some restorative function. The rest of this […]

The flood story you may be most familiar with is probably Noah’s Ark, but it’s far from the only tale of a great flood sent by a god to destroy a civilization. It’s almost as if there are eight basic story plots in the world, not seven: Overcoming the monster, rags to riches, the quest, […]

A large-scale review of studies into 19 different “treatments” for autism has concluded that, for every single one, there is no strong evidence to support their use. Worryingly, the research team also found that many of these studies lack any assessment of patient safety. They’ve compiled their findings into an online database that’s easy to […]

Giant city-swallowing cracks in Earth’s surface are a “new geo-hydrological hazard,” threatening millions of city dwellers across the Global South and beyond, a new study looking at the large urban gullies creeping through the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Central Africa, has found. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign […]

The Butterfly Nebula is among the most beautiful nebulae out there. It’s a planetary nebula formed by an aging star throwing out layers of plasma before turning into a white dwarf. New observations have allowed astronomers to track the formation of cosmic dust in this peculiar environment, understanding where the building blocks of planets, including […]

In most countries, people have a belief about where they’d end up if they dug their way through the center of the Earth and popped up on the other side, more technically known as the “antipode”.  For people in the USA, they think it’s China. For people in the UK, they think it’s Australia. Australians […]

The world’s tallest bridge has undergone final load tests ahead of opening, with 96 weighted trucks driving over the bridge to test its structural integrity. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. Construction of the Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge in Guizhou province, China, […]

An international team of researchers has provided new insights into the interior of Mars. The Earth is moderately well divided. It has a crust, a mantle, and an outer and inner core. The crust, mantle, and core division is present on the Red Planet as well, but unlike the mostly smooth mantle of Earth, Mars […]

In 1978, while inspecting a faulty detector inside the Soviet Union’s most powerful particle accelerator, physicist Anatoli Bugorski was struck in the head by a proton beam traveling close to the speed of light. Amazingly, Bugorski remains alive to this day, and while government secrecy prevented details of his medical assessment from being leaked, researchers […]

For several years, astronomers have been seeing the hallmark of planet formation around stellar protoplanetary disks. A baby star is surrounded by a disk of gas and dust, and to observatories like ALMA, grooves in the disk appear as dark rings. These grooves are believed to be formed by fledgling planets, but no planets have […]

A new study has found direct genetic evidence pointing to the cause of the devastating “Plague of Justinian” first described nearly 1,500 years ago. Reports of the disease first came around 541 CE in the port of Pelusium in Lower Egypt, before spreading through trade routes around the Byzantine Empire. During a particularly intense outbreak […]

In the past few centuries, scientists have conducted countless experiments that have revolutionized our understanding of the universe. Very few have been as impactful as the Michelson-Morley experiment, which attempted to find evidence of the luminiferous aether, and found nothing. First, a little context. In the 19th Century, physicists revolutionized our understanding of light, in […]

Sex education has become a complex topic in the United States. Despite the overwhelming evidence that it offers substantive health benefits for children and young people, there is no federal law requiring schools to teach it. As a result, the decision to teach students about sexual matters lies with states or even local school districts. […]

When we think of amphibians like frogs and toads, we often imagine spawn. Gloopy little eggs spilling out into ponds. It’s a great glimpse into the metamorphosis of anurans, allowing us to see them grow from egg to tadpole, to froglet, or toadlet. There is, however, one species that keeps things a little more intimate. […]

What killed off the Tasmanian tiger? For a long time, it was believed this enigmatic marsupial went extinct due to being exterminated as a “pest” and competition with newly introduced dingoes. However, new research suggests there may have been another factor at play: the animal’s genetic diversity. Tasmanian tigers, or Thylacines (Thylacinus cynocephalus), sometimes known […]

Deep below the seafloor, locked in a layer of 100-million-year-old sediment, a lifeform quietly lives. It’s not quite Godzilla, nor a long-lost Megalodon, but it does go to show how life on Earth can dwell under the most extreme and bizarre circumstances. Scientists discovered that communities of microbes living beneath the seafloor are able to […]