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Wildfires can have a devastating impact on the environment, but in some parts of the globe they are a fact of life, one that some species have been found to adapt to by changing their coloration in a phenomenon known as fire melanism. ADVERTISEMENT GO AD FREE The coloration that best serves an animal depends […]

Deep beneath California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, geologists have found evidence of Earth’s rigid outer layer sinking into the mantle, like a sugar cube slowly descending and dissolving into a pool of hot syrup. ADVERTISEMENT GO AD FREE This is known as lithospheric foundering, a process where a portion of Earth’s lithosphere (the rigid outer layer […]

The contrast between two clusters of marsquakes has led two scientists to suspect the internal structure of the Red Planet is quite different between the northern and southern hemispheres. If so, this would be crucial, possibly decisive, evidence in the long-running debate as to why the Martian southern hemisphere is far higher than the north. […]

Have you ever looked at your life or the world around you, or even at the universe more generally, and wondered whether everything is exactly as it seems? If you have felt like this, perhaps you’ve come across potential explanations for what might be going on. One increasingly popular idea is the so-called Simulation Hypothesis […]

Once again, we’re here to tell you that evolution is not always linear. In Wisconsin’s Lake Mendota, for example, bacteria evolve in a kind of endless loop – think Groundhog Day if it were set underwater and on the microscopic scale. ADVERTISEMENT GO AD FREE A new study, led by researchers from the University of […]

Donald Trump is back in the Oval Office, and the US appears set to continue yo-yo-ing in and out of key global health and environmental bodies. On day one of his second act, the Home Alone 2 cameo-maker signed a raft of controversial executive orders – including one pulling the country out of the World […]

An Australian man who moved abroad has revealed that he only realized that the Moon looks different in the Northern Hemisphere after several years of living there. ADVERTISEMENT GO AD FREE Popular TikTok user coreyyy.exe put an appeal out to his followers for any facts which they think should be common knowledge, but for one […]

Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) did it! It survived its perilous perihelion, getting ten times closer to the Sun than Earth does. This comet is a sungrazer comet, and the encounter made it bright – so bright that even at a considerable distance, it is visible from Earth. But it is possible that the doom was […]

Among the sweep of executive orders signed by the new US president Donald Trump is the decision to rename Denali as Mount McKinley. It’s a controversial move, but not unprecedented – just the latest chapter in a dispute that’s been going on for decades. ADVERTISEMENT GO AD FREE Standing at 6,190 meters (20,310 feet) tall […]

A new brain-computer interface has achieved an “unprecedented” level of control for a person who isn’t able to use their limbs, enabling them to fly a quadcopter in a gaming environment. The technology allows for dexterous finger control by dividing the digits into groups, creating four degrees of freedom when operating a control by thinking. […]

A new type of nuclear thermal propulsion reactor fuel has been successfully tested at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, with hopes that the fuel could take humans to Mars in the not-too-distant future. ADVERTISEMENT GO AD FREE Getting to the Red Planet, as things currently stand, will be a long-haul mission. Mars is, on average, […]

The ancestor of all four-limbed creatures crawled out of the ocean around 400 million years ago. Then, 350 million years later, the ancestors of today’s whale species crawled back in. Its descendants that swim through Earth’s waters might be some of the largest and most talked about ocean species, with seriously impressive hunting techniques and […]

When observing the various objects in our Solar System and beyond, scientists have found evidence that some of them appear to be shrinking. So what is going on, and is this happening to the Earth? Mercury is shrinking ADVERTISEMENT GO AD FREE Back in 1974, NASA’s Mariner 10 mission flew by Mercury and discovered evidence […]

Structural differences between male and female brains are apparent from the very earliest days of life, according to a new study. The researchers found that even in young babies, female brains have more gray matter and male brains have more white matter, as well as an overall larger volume.  ADVERTISEMENT GO AD FREE “We found […]

At the bottom of the “Sacred Cenote” in Mexico sits a layer of ancient treasure consisting of gold artworks, beautifully carved jade plaque, and human remains. These relics were not carelessly discarded but deliberately offered to the gods, chunked into the sinkhole as if it were a portal to the watery underworld. ADVERTISEMENT GO AD […]

As the world grapples with a flood of Large Language Models, some computer programmers have gone old school, reaching back to where it all began by reanimating the first chatbot using its original code. This comes sixty years after Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT created ELIZA, named after the character Eliza Doolittle from Pygmalion and generally […]

Moments after the presidential inauguration, US President Donald Trump signed several anti-scientific executive orders (EOs), such as taking the United States out of the Paris Agreement to curtail human-made climate change and withdrawing the US from the World Health Organization. He also signed an EO targeting trans and non-binary people which had the unintended consequence […]

I am sure that you have all watched a scene where a hero, villain, or nameless goon has been pushed into a pool of water or river, then, wham, bam, thank you Ma’am!, a ferocious swarm of piranhas rips the flesh off their bones leaving a pearly white skeleton in its wake. It has been […]

Popular culture, especially in relation to sci-fi, is filled with nifty gadgets and incredible devices. One of the more entertaining and arguably iconic is the “shrink ray”, a staple of many TV and film plots, like Marvel’s Ant-Man, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, and so on. The principle is simple – scientists have a gun […]

From the brain-exploding Martians of Mars Attacks! to the wonderful diversity of Men In Black’s extraterrestrial entourage, the possibility of alien life is a concept that has captured the imagination of our entire planet. Most of us only get to explore it at the movies – but for some scientists, the search for alien earths […]