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A tornado is a rotating column of air that touches the land, often connected to the base of a thunderstorm. The direction of spin is typically influenced by the hemisphere it’s in, but some very rare tornadoes have bucked the trend. With windspeeds sometimes topping hundreds of miles an hour, they can have enormously devastating […]

It will be sad when the universe can no longer surprise us, but today is not that day. South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope has detected a faint ring almost in the direction of the center of the galaxy – but what it is and where it came from are mysteries we get to explore. Advertisement […]

They say out of sight is out of mind, and there’s no greater proof of that than the world’s oceans. A new study illustrates this in a particularly grim way, showing through the application of artificial intelligence (AI) models that we’ve drastically undercounted the threat of extinction to marine species – and the true figure […]

Gallium is a fun material. It’s solid as long as you are not picking it up with your own hands, because it would turn liquid due to its relatively low melting temperature. For physicists, one of the two stable isotopes of gallium also has another use: it can be employed to study solar neutrinos. And […]

A very special clutch of snakelets have just arrived at Memphis Zoo, USA, born through a methodology that marks a world-first for reptile reproduction. They are Louisiana pinesnakes (Pituophis ruthveni), a species that’s threatened in the wild, but one for which we have crucial samples stored in a “frozen zoo”. Advertisement Cryopreservation, also called biobanking, […]

Next time you do something embarrassing, just think: “At least I’m not a wild bird that had to be rescued, only for the humans to discover I wasn’t hurt, just full.” And if this example seems a bit left-field, boy do we have the story for you. A bald eagle was recently rescued in Missouri […]

This week on Break It Down: orcas disable another boat as a new theory is put forward for the behavior, bacteria pass “memories” of perturbed genes to descendants, SETI scans 2,880 galaxies for advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, what you need to know about human parvovirus B19, flying spaghetti monsters sighted on a sea mount expedition, and […]

In 1931, at the age of 28, Louis Leakey made his first trip to Olduvai Gorge, in what is now Tanzania. His goal: to prove that Africa – specifically East Africa, where he had been born and grown up – was the so-called “cradle of humanity”. It was, he had been told, a fool’s errand. […]

It was the writer Edgar Allan Poe who first proposed a solution to Olber’s paradox: why is the sky dark at night? The reason for the darkness of the night is to be found in the fact that our cosmos has limits, at the very least in time. Since then, astronomers have been searching for […]

A newly developed material may be about to revolutionize solar energy. Created using what the researchers call a “multi-junction” approach, the material is already more efficient than many traditional solar panels – while simultaneously being thin and flexible enough to be incorporated into everyday objects. Advertisement As the scholars Flansburgh and Linnell famously explained:  “The […]

The Earth has an electric field that allows atmospheric particles to escape near the poles. Yet despite the concept being proposed around the time humans were first reaching space, it’s never been verified, let alone measured, until now. In the course of a suborbital flight, NASA’s Endurance rocket has done both. Advertisement Planetary scientists proposed […]

Does your cat’s big fat belly appear to comedically swing from side to side when it walks or runs? You might just be looking at its primordial pouch, which, despite looking completely ridiculous, provides your feisty feline with a complex evolutionary advantage. All cats – male or female, neutered or intact – have a primordial […]

As the search for ever-more sources of clean, renewable energy continues, it seems like there’s one resource we’ve forgotten to tap into. Not for nothing is Earth known as the “Blue Planet” – with more than 70 percent of the globe being covered by seas and oceans, is there no way we could harness the […]

Between 23 and 11.6 million years ago, an unlucky sea cow had a very bad day. It got munched on by not one, but two types of carnivores as it became dinner for both a shark and some kind of ancient crocodilian. The most unfortunate of sandwiches. Advertisement The gruesome scene has been pieced together […]

The US Bureau of Reclamation has come up with a plan to prevent invasive smallmouth bass from taking over the Grand Canyon, and it involves turning down the temperature. Advertisement Smallmouth bass are typically native to the eastern and central United States, but they are also highly effective predators that love nothing more than chowing […]

Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) has been a right tease. Back in May, it looked on the way to brightening steadily and becoming visible to the naked eye by October – however, in July, a paper pointed out several unusual features that suggested the comet might not survive the close encounter with the Sun in less […]

A pod of orcas has taken out a boat off the coast of Spain, damaging the rudder to such an extent that the two-person crew were stranded off Cape Finisterre. That’s according to a statement emailed to the New York Times by their rescuers – and given recent events, it’s not all that surprising. Advertisement […]

Science fiction has its fair share of galaxy-spanning civilizations. From the United Federation of Planets to the Galactic Empire, from the rule of Paul Atreides to that of Cleon II, we have fantasized about people spreading across the vast gulf of space and building a galactic culture. Could such a thing exist in real life? […]

The Vikings are renowned for their violent raids on foreign lands, yet new research suggests that murder and bloodthirst were not the norm across all of Scandinavia. Comparing the levels of violence evidenced by Viking-Age skeletons in Norway and Denmark, the study authors found that interpersonal attacks were far more common in the northern realm, […]

The locations of “knot-like structures” in the human genome have been mapped for the first time. Known as i-motifs, these odd shapes were reported to exist in 1993, but initially treated with suspicion. The discovery of how frequent they are, and their locations, suggests they play important roles in our health, but can also lead […]