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If you’ve ever had a cat, you might have heard your veterinarian mention “cat flu”, probably telling you that you don’t need to worry about catching Felix’s sniffles. It’s true that the infections we traditionally call “cat flu” aren’t transmissible to humans – but what about actual influenza viruses? Are our feline friends vulnerable to […]

For those of us with siblings, the thought that our parents might secretly favor one over the rest has probably crossed our minds at least once. But it can’t be true, right? Wrong – and new research has also explored what might make a child more likely to be the favorite. Advertisement To do so, […]

At 2:03 am EST on January 16, Blue Origin’s New Glenn lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The rocket is 98 meters (322 feet) tall, among the tallest around, and this first launch was a demonstration as part of the US Space Force’s National Security Space Launch program. It tested the Blue Ring […]

A lot of work has explored the noses of dogs, and rats have even been trained to sniff out illegally tracked wildlife – however, most research on smelling focuses on mammals and insects, not spiders. An orb-weaving spider species was specially chosen as the subject of a new study because the females emit sex hormones […]

A massive release of sulfur has been largely blamed for the dramatic cooling that followed Chicxulub’s crash landing, but did it really happen like we thought it did? A new study is raising questions about the long-held belief that an eruption of sulfur (among other things) triggered a severe and lasting “impact winter”, arguing that […]

A gigantic volcanic eruption some time around the year 2900 BCE may have darkened the sun, leading to freezing temperatures, crop failures, and famine across the northern hemisphere. At roughly the same time, a Neolithic community in Denmark sacrificed hundreds of so-called “sun stones”, possibly in an attempt to restore the natural order and save […]

In Doctor Who, an alien species called the Silurians exists – technologically-advanced humanoid reptiles who lived long before humans, going into hiding and being basically undiscovered again until everyone’s favorite time-traveling alien came along in his phone box. So far, so not science. However, in 2018 two University of Cambridge scientists named their paper The Silurian […]

The sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022 not only heightened geopolitical tensions but also unleashed an unprecedented environmental event, releasing the largest recorded amount of methane from a single human-caused incident – 465,000 metric tons – into the atmosphere and surrounding waters, according to three new studies. The Nord Stream pipelines, which […]

Features of the famous Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment have been applied in the real world using a single antimony atom embedded in a silicon chip. Surprising as it may seem, the atom has a more complex quantum life than even the theoretical cat manages. Whether it can match the endless variation of real cats remains […]

More than 1.2 million years ago, our ancestors Homo erectus developed the tools and intellectual capacity to survive in very dry conditions, new findings indicate. The adaptation was important to human survival, breaking us out of our dependence on a relatively scarce ecosystem. It may also have been crucial to our first great expansion into […]

Researchers have developed a new approach in optical atomic clocks that brings forth a major goal in science: the redefinition of a second. The fundamental unit of time could soon be based on something beyond the transition of two hyperfine ground states of cesium, which has been the definition since 1967. The first concrete step […]

For possibly the first time ever, a meteorite has been captured on video and audio as it struck the Earth, just outside one man’s home. Advertisement Joe Velaidum, of Marshfield, Prince Edward Island, Canada, was standing outside his home last July, before setting off for a walk with his dog. If he had lingered a […]

A bear-sized bluefin tuna has been sold at a Tokyo market for ¥207 million ($1.3 million), boasting enough fishy flesh to create a sashimi platter that could satisfy an entire school of sharks. Advertisement The 276-kilogram (608-pound) fish was auctioned at the Toyosu Market, the largest wholesale fish market in the world, and bought by […]

Not happy with the way you’re feeling? What if there were a simple solution, one where you could simply slap a sticker on your wrist, and lo and behold, your whole mood changes? It sounds like something from sci-fi (and you’ll know that it is if you’re familiar with Doctor Who), but there are companies […]

People over on Reddit are discussing an old urban legend that NASA astronauts are issued with cyanide capsules – or other means intended to bring about death – in case they should find themselves in a situation where all hope of a return to Earth was lost. Advertisement “Probably a weird question but maybe someone […]

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced that it has banned the use of synthetic food dye Red No.3 in food, drink, and ingested medicine products, after studies in rats linked it to cancer. Advertisement What is Red No. 3 – and what’s happening to it? Red No. 3, also known as erythrosine, […]

Just over two years ago, observations from JWST had astronomers puzzled. Some galaxies were spotted that seemed to break our expected models. If the light we were getting from them was coming from their stars, they were simply too big to have formed in the few hundred million years that separated them from the birth […]

The only company with legal rights to salvage items from the wreckage of the RMS Titanic has scrapped its plans to recover artifacts from the sunken ship – at least for now – following a legal challenge from the US Government. Advertisement Many shipwrecks – such as military ships that have sunk in US waters […]

Astronaut Don Pettit has taken one of the most incredible astrophotography pictures ever, and possibly the best taken by humans from the International Space Station (ISS). The latest composition is a visual symphony of cosmic, terrestrial, and technological objects captured as the space station speeds around our planet at 8 kilometers (5 miles) per second. […]