News

Would you like to go to a spider’s birthday party? No? Suit yourself, I think it would be excellent. Eight legs call for as many balloons, but how many candles might you expect on the cake? It might shock you to learn that for Number 16, the longest-lived spider on record, that number reached a […]

Time is everything to us: in terms of physical laws, in how we experience the world, and how society works. Still, its true nature remains beyond us. As scientists search for a deeper understanding, the way humans relate to time has changed massively. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in […]

Welcome to True Crime in Science. Over six episodes – all of which you can watch here – we have discussed some well-known true crime cases, as well as some cases you may not have heard of, and then looked further into the science and the forensic details behind them. In this special episode, we delve […]

Start talking about the Loch Ness monster and you’ll be met with all manner of ideas about what it could be. From plesiosaur to giant eels and even floating logs, the Loch Ness monster has captured imaginations from the small Scottish village of Drumnadrochit across the globe. But what could Nessie actually be? A case […]

The nearest star to the Sun might be several light-years away, but this doesn’t make the Solar System isolated. Asteroids and comets that formed around other stars flow through the Milky Way across millions of streams. In fact, thousands of these interstellar interlopers are currently within the orbit of Neptune. The difficult job is finding […]

How can we predict the future? A good way is to look into the past, and who better to ask than one of Earth’s longest-living animals: the quahog clam. These modest mollusks don’t look like much, but their shells tell a staggering story as they store a record of the environmental conditions across their lifespan. […]

Scientists researching myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), have claimed to have developed the first-ever blood test for the condition. ME/CFS is a debilitating, long-term illness that can cause people to experience extreme fatigue, sleep problems, difficulty thinking, and a worsening of their symptoms after any type of activity. It’s thought to […]

In 1927, a respected physicist conducted one of the largest experiments into telepathy the world has ever undertaken, involving over 25,000 participants.  Born in 1851, Oliver Lodge was an English physicist whose work was key to the development of radio communication, creating a device that became standard in wireless telegraph receivers after he demonstrated it […]

In 2006, a study published in the journal Biology Letters described a fossil unlike any ever seen before. It captured a prehistoric reptile that lived around 125 million years ago. That, in itself, wasn’t terribly surprising, but the fact that it had two heads really, really was. Bicephalism describes a quirk in animal development that […]

If stretched out straight, this recently discovered woolly rhino horn would be taller than Lady Gaga with a hat on. It’s the longest rhino horn of its kind ever recovered, a record-breaking relic that’s shedding new light on one of the Ice Age’s most mysterious megabeasts. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. […]

Training animals in captivity for vital instances like health checks and being able to give them medicines is a necessary part of the job, but it is not without its challenges. While logistics have a part to play, the individual personality of the animal is also a big factor, as researchers in Brazil found when […]

Nail-biting and nose-picking have probably been around since our ancient ancestors walked the Earth, but these habits don’t leave much of a physical trace. Tooth-picking, on the other hand, does – or so it was thought.  For decades, anthropologists have examined the dental remains of prehistoric hominins and noticed deep, V-shaped notches near the gum […]

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter are excellent spacecraft that have provided insights into the Red Planet time and time again. They are also capable of doing things beyond their standard job. They recently looked at interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. They were also used to measure the winds on the […]

Elephants were on the menu for hominins living in Italy 400,000 years ago, and a rare fossil reveals the tools they used, as well as those they got out of the process. It’s no secret that our ancestors, and some other branches of the human family tree, liked a big meal. There’s evidence, for example, […]

On July 1 this year, astronomers discovered an object moving through the Solar System at escape velocity, our third interstellar visitor that we know about. The object, dubbed 3I/ATLAS, is now known to be a comet due to outgassing as it gets closer to the Sun on its way through the Solar System. Astronomers have […]

This pocket-sized new spider is rocking a unique look. Near perfectly split down the middle, its left legs are dark orange while its right is a whitish salt-and-pepper color. Remarkably, this is not just an aesthetic division: one side of the body is female and the other is male. Scientists at Chulalongkorn University and Ubon […]

Over the last week, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) spacecraft Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) were tasked with an unusual request; instead of looking down onto the Red Planet as they usually do, they looked into space. There, they tried to catch a glimpse of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. Team is still analyzing […]

Images taken by JWST reveal the star that became SN2025pht before it exploded, providing our best view of a red supergiant proto-supernova. The cloud of dust hiding the star from our eyes may answer the question of why we haven’t seen more. SN2025pht was spotted on June 29 this year. Its location, 40 million light-years […]

It’s a credit to how good Isaac Newton was at physics and math that people rarely mention that time he threatened to burn his mother’s house down, or the equally baffling time he stuck a number of needles into his own eyeballs to see what would happen. Yes, when Newton wasn’t revolutionizing our notions of […]

Newly released data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that the 2024-25 flu season was a tough one for the nation’s children, with 280 pediatric deaths recorded. This marks the worst season for child mortality since records of pediatric flu deaths began in 2004 – except, that is, for the H1N1 […]