News

In May 2015, a wave of death swept over rural Kazakhstan. In the space of just a few weeks, some 200,000 saiga antelopes mysteriously dropped dead. It took years of scientific snooping to find the culprit, but researchers eventually weeded out a clear chain of events that led to the mass die-off. Saiga antelopes (Saiga […]

According to a new study, however, we might have all that kind of backwards – or at least sideways. Non-vegetarians, it seems, may well be kinder and more “normal” than vegans and vegetarians – but their meat-eschewing peers are pretty far from the two extremes they’ve been assigned. Rather, they’re independent thinkers, valuing personal choice […]

What’s the greatest mystery in the world? Is it the nature of dark matter, the origins of life on this planet, or maybe it’s whether we are alone in the universe? Or, more profound still, perhaps the biggest mystery is one that you’ve probably never considered: how the hell does tickling work? This may sound […]

Hawai’i’s most active volcano is at it again with a session of activity dating back to December 2024. Now on episode 23 of volcanic activity in the latest stretch, the volcano is up to something not seen since the middle of the 1980s. Kilauea is one of the world’s most active volcanoes and was formed […]

The icy moons of the Solar System, like Europa around Jupiter and Enceladus around Saturn, are the most likely candidates in the Solar System for life beyond Earth. They have deep oceans, and in the case of Enceladus, we know there are crucial elements for life and chemical activity in that ocean. A new paper […]

It’s tempting to think of the brain like a computer. Information goes in, *stuff* happens, and actions come out. Say, for example, you’re happily hiking along a trail when a bear appears. Your eyes see the bear; that visual information triggers something inside your brain that says, “OH NO, BAD THING!”; and the result of […]

Researchers have broken the record for the world’s first successful petabit-class transmission over more than 1,000 kilometers (610 miles). They were able to send 1.02 petabits per second over 1,808 kilometers (1,123 miles). That’s about the distance between Missouri and Montana, or Naples and Berlin. This work was conducted by an international team led by […]

Spiders might be famous for freaking people out with their spindly legs and the way they scuttle about, but they are actually a remarkable group of highly diverse hunters. Many species of spiders possess venom as well as a multitude of prey-catching tactics, so researchers decided to look at the combination of venom potency and […]

The Great Wall of China is the best-known strip of fortifications in East Asia, if not the world. But just a few days’ horse ride away lies the remnants of a long-forgotten wall system that once rivaled it, but served a strikingly different purpose. In a new archeological dig, researchers have excavated parts of the […]

The offspring of Seychelles warblers (Acrocephalus sechellensis) are surprisingly unaffected by losing a parent, whether through death or divorce, even while they still need adult care. The finding may be quite specific to this one species, which has a relatively unusual way of raising its young, but it still goes so much against expectations that […]

Four gorillas that were rescued from poachers have been reintroduced to the Virunga National Park in the lush mountains of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).  After a few years of rehabilitation, the critically endangered female eastern lowland gorillas — named Mapendo, Ndjingala, Isangi, and Lulingu — have been moved to Mt. Tshiaberimu. This […]

In their search for ways to combat enemy forces while not necessarily causing them lasting harm, the US military has had some “creative” ideas over the decades. But there was one project temporarily entertained by the US Air Force during the 1990s that really took things in a novel and somewhat problematic direction. The plan, […]

The Hubble Tension is one of the most fascinating scientific debates of the last decade. Imagine having two of the most advanced conducting cutting-edge observatories to extract the expansion rate of the universe. You refine your values, collect more data, and suddenly the two observatories begin to disagree. Is one right and the other wrong? […]

The story of human evolution is far messier and less straightforward than most people think, protagonized by a procession of misfits that go against everything we think we know about how our ancestors developed. Among these prehistoric oddballs is an individual that lived in China some 300,000 years ago and that doesn’t fit into any […]

Fragments of ancient household item unidentified for 90 years after being excavated have been found to be pieces of baby rattles from 4,000-4,500 years ago. The discovery offers archaeologists a chance to learn how these implements have changed, and how they have not, in all that time Dr Mette Hald of the National Museum of […]

For the first time, a long-period radio transient Source (LPRT) has also been spotted by an X-ray telescope. That means we now have observations of this object from both ends of the electromagnetic spectrum, but not at the wavelengths in between. Despite the sources of two LPRTs recently being identified, the team that found the […]

After silently lurking for almost 50 years, a prion disease erupted in the brain of a woman in the US, triggering a rapid and severe neurological decline before taking her life. The source of the condition, it appears, was a since-discontinued hormone treatment she received decades earlier that unknowingly introduced a rogue protein into her […]

An unhealthy ocean means an unhealthy planet, and without it, we simply wouldn’t exist. That’s just a fact, but in the same breath, a healthy ocean can lead to a more resilient planet, and a better future for every living thing on Earth. The best news of all? Given the chance, the ocean can recover […]

Not everyone is happy with the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. The fact that particles are only statistically likely to be somewhere you expect them to be is a tough cookie to swallow. To solve this, some scientists created the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, arguing that all the probabilistic accounts actually physically happen in […]

There’s a fair chance you’ve heard this “fact” somewhere or other: humans, apparently, share some 60 percent of our DNA with… bananas. It’s surprising, and it’s meant to be – after all, they’re so yellow, and squishy, both qualities notably rare in your average human. But hey, there’s math in it, so presumably the claim […]