News

The biggest aircraft ever built lies in ruin, but a new contender is gathering momentum.  WindRunner is a supersized aircraft that’s currently under development by the Colorado-based company Radia. Flaunting its design on their website, the startup explains that the plane will boast an 80-meter (262-foot) wingspan and measure 108 meters (354 feet) from tip […]

Sir David Attenborough’s latest film OCEAN includes a documentary film world-first: chilling footage from the point-of-view of a bottom trawler scraping the seabed. Fish, cephalopods, and rays can all be seen fleeing the wall of destruction headed their way as metal and rope wipe out ecosystems that take years to recover. It makes for difficult […]

Fuel cells that react liquid sodium metal with air could be the power source required to give electric airplanes much longer ranges, a new paper has proposed. The idea has yet to leave the laboratory bench, but the authors have demonstrated energy-to-weight ratios other technologies can only dream about. In a world hungry for low-pollution […]

Mars is a frigid desert all over, but no two places on the Red Planet are exactly the same. There are craters, fluvial valleys, volcanoes, deep canyons, and fields of dunes. But you can also find places that have a little bit of everything, such as Deuteronilus Cavus, a peculiar crater that formed on Mars […]

The Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) is an exceptional site, and its Goode Solar Telescope (GST) is a great instrument. Thanks to a new upgrade that pushes it to its theoretical limit, that special instrument has just become even better. The telescope has now delivered the clearest views of fine structures within the solar corona, […]

For the first time ever, researchers have published a photograph of a living Upemba lechwe (Kobus anselli), a rarely spotted species of antelope that a new survey suggests is on the brink of extinction. The photo was captured during an aerial survey of the Kamalondo Depression, a large region of sunken land in the south […]

The common death adder (Acanthophis antarcticus) already has quite a fearsome reputation as one of the most venomous land snakes found in Australia. And what is more dangerous than a death adder with two fangs ready to strike? Well, a death adder with three of course! Keepers at the Australian Reptile Park made the unusual […]

In the wild, baby animals like giraffes or horses will be up and walking within hours of birth – and maybe once, we would have found that impressive. Now, though? Nature can suck it. We’ve got it beat – with 3D-printed robots that can walk straight out of the machine that created them. “Soft robotics […]

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator on the planet, can provide a tremendous amount of energy to particles and ions, making them go up to 99.9999991 percent the speed of light. This energy is incredible but tiny compared to occasional high-energy cosmic rays, which make the LHC protons look like snails. […]

It’s a well-known fact that human babies are, well, a bit rubbish at lots of things. Unlike many baby mammals, which are up and walking within hours of popping out, human babies rely on adults for literally everything for several years. But there’s one area where babies are killing it compared to older humans, and that’s […]

Stars, planets, humans, and corgis are all made of matter, but in the universe exists its opposite, which is known as antimatter. Matter and antimatter have opposite electric charges, but their other properties are the same. Or are they? There must be a reason why the universe is almost exclusively matter; the answer might be […]

The most complete Neanderthal fingerprint ever discovered may have been left behind by a prehistoric artist while painting a face on a pebble using red ocher. Found at the San Lázaro rock shelter in central Spain, the rouge dactylogram provides new evidence for the cognitive abilities of Neanderthals, implying that they shared our tendency to […]

Stars have magnetic fields that initially get stronger as the speed of the star’s rotation increases. There are still aspects of this astronomers don’t understand, but the mystery turns out to be much greater when the stars orbit each other every few days or less. The implications of this are not entirely clear, but the […]

Grass is a relatively new addition to planet Earth. For most of the “Age of the Dinosaurs”, sprawling green pastures simply didn’t exist. The likes of Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, and their other dinosaur buddies from the Triassic and Jurassic probably never had the pleasure of setting foot on grass. However, pinning down the exact origin of […]

In the mangroves of Singapore lives a very fancy crab. The face-banded crab, Parasesarma eumolpe, is a lot to take in with colors galore, but now scientists have made an incredible discovery about how some of this coloration helps them to communicate. You see, they’ve been firing off light signals with what are, essentially, fancy […]

It’s hard not to feel jealous of New Zealand, home to some of the planet’s most spectacular organisms. They’ve got blue mushrooms and the world’s rarest and most eccentric birds (that aren’t easy to get sperm from, FYI). The most recent specimen to catch our eye? A snail whose worm slurping skills makes that spaghetti […]

What on Earth were the pyramids up to? The current scholarly consensus is that they served as monumental royal tombs. Of course, that has not stopped people from proposing more… creative theories about their purpose, ranging from interdimensional energy conduits to ancient grain silos built by Joseph (and no, they were not built by aliens). […]

When you think about a prehistoric mass extinction event, chances are your mind goes to the K-Pg boundary, and the day that fateful asteroid smashed into Earth with enough force to wipe out some three-fourths of all plant and animal life, putting an end to the age of dinosaur supremacy forever. It’s the best known […]

Wake up? Brush your teeth. Going to bed? Brush your teeth. The dental routine of being a human can be a bit monotonous, but it’s an important step towards maintaining a happy mouth. It can be slightly baffling, then, to spot a photo of a bonobo with a seemingly perfect grin. How are wild animals […]