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Last week, the Internet was puzzled by a physics problem involving a set of scales, an iron ball, and a ping pong ball of equal size. Now that that one has been cleared up, Reddit has been mulling over a new problem: why won’t this contraption turn? “I don’t know where else to ask,” Redditor […]

US Senator Cory Booker made history earlier this week when he delivered the longest speech in the Senate’s history, holding the floor for a whopping 25 hours and 5 minutes. In all that time, Booker didn’t sit down, eat, or sleep – but what does such a feat of endurance do to the body? Not […]

If asked to make the lightest (least dense) solid possible, many people would start looking at the start of the periodic table for low-mass atoms. However, nature shows there are much better ways to lower something’s density, and humans have taken the approach much further.  Volcanoes spit out lava that becomes heavy basalt, but sometimes […]

As most people know, it is possible to use a magnifying glass to focus the Sun’s light and burn a hole in whatever has angered you that day. But is it possible to harness light from the Moon in the same way? When the Moon is full, could you focus this light and use it […]

Bombardier, the Canadian jet maker, will put its Global 8000 private jet into service later this year, and it’s a speedy beast. The jet is set to be the fastest civilian aircraft since Concorde and will fly at top speeds of Mach 0.94 (1,152 kilometers per hour / 715 miles per hour), which nearly exceeds […]

An American wielding a can of cola has reportedly been arrested after attempting to visit North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean, home to the Sentinelese people, one of the most isolated and vulnerable tribes in the world. Experts have described the case as “reckless and idiotic”.   The man, a 24-year-old US national called […]

See that teeny tiny rectangle next to that pencil tip up there? That’s a pacemaker – the world’s smallest in fact, which has just been revealed in a new study. Cardiac pacemakers are up there with some of the most impressive innovations in modern medicine. After decades of refinement, today’s models are compact, capable of […]

On Monday, SpaceX made space history, as four astronauts were launched into a pole-to-pole orbit not traveled by any human before them. But judging by the reports of one of the private astronauts, their time in space didn’t get off to a great start, after the vomiting began. Though the Fram2 mission is a private […]

Even large, predatory dinosaurs occasionally had to stop for a drink. Footprints found on the Isle of Skye off the coast of Scotland suggest that both large predatory dinosaurs and their prey drank together from the edges of shallow freshwater lagoons 167 million years ago. At the Kilmaluag Formation at Prince Charles’s Point on Skye’s […]

It was a paranoid time. The use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few years previously in 1945 had ushered in a new age of uncertainty. Sure, the devastating bombs had demonstrated America’s military power, but for those who understood the situation, it was only a matter of time before the US’s enemies […]

The hoots and whistles of bonobos may seem like simple, wild calls, but a closer listen reveals that their communication shares more structural similarities with human language than once thought. Bonobos are the most vocal of the great apes, using a variety of high-pitched calls to communicate with other members of the species. Some of […]

Cratonic thinning, a phenomenon geologists think happened hundreds of millions of years ago, appears to be taking place far beneath researchers’ feet. Earth’s continents have regions of very old and stable rocks, known as cratons, surrounded by regions whose age is measured in tens or hundreds of millions of years, rather than billions like the […]

The history of the Great Blue Hole in the Caribbean is being revealed by a 30-meter (98-foot) sediment core taken from the depths of the marine sinkhole. Chronicling 5,700 years of natural history, the sample shows hurricanes are becoming increasingly common in this part of the southwestern Caribbean and a stormy future may lie ahead.  […]

The Sun is constantly spewing solar wind, a stream of charged particles, into interplanetary space. Occasionally, it bursts through in waves that can slam into planets. Geomagnetic storms happen when they hit Earth, for example. Observations of Jupiter from 2017 have now revealed some major changes around the largest planet in the Solar System. Jupiter’s […]

Researchers have found that Americans have lower survival rates than Europeans. This result was consistent across all wealth levels, even among the wealthiest Americans who still lived longer than their poorer counterparts, but not as long as Europeans. Over the last six decades, America has witnessed a significant transfer of wealth from the middle classes […]

It is time to journey back through Earth’s geological history. Wind back the clock around 4 billion years and take a look at some of the oldest rocks that can still be found on Earth today, and even what we might learn from looking inside them. We know relatively little about the earliest parts of […]

A poll once found that just over 40 percent of Americans believe humans and dinosaurs co-existed, living alongside each other like Fred Flintstone and Dino. And no, most of them probably weren’t making a clever point about modern birds technically being avian dinosaurs. The 2015 poll by YouGov found that 27 percent of Americans thought […]

A stalled atmospheric river is likely to result in multiple rounds of extreme rainfall being dumped on parts of the central US over the coming days, with forecasters warning of unprecedented flash floods. The greatest danger is expected over an area stretching from Arkansas to Kentucky, though deluges are likely all the way up to […]

When you think about the bottom of the ocean what do you think of – shipwrecks, sharks, or seabed sediments secretly tackling the climate crisis? Did that last point make your list? Well, it’s not surprising if it didn’t as scientists are just starting to understand it themselves. It is part of a relatively new […]

Unlike Christmas, Easter curiously falls on a different date each year. While Easter is always on a Sunday, it can sometimes spring up in March and the next year in late April. For Western Christians, Easter 2024 was celebrated on March 31, but Easter 2025 is on April 20. It will then jump back to […]