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It’s a thought that may have crossed your mind at some point: what would be the practicalities of firing your enemies into the Sun? Fortunately, an associate professor of astronomy, who hopefully doesn’t have access to a rocket ship, has the answers. Apart from the obvious moral difficulties, physics is not working in your favor. […]

Colors are not a static entity, but are subjective both personally and culturally. So it’s no surprise that people continue to be fascinated by an online quiz based on the arbitrary boundary between blue and green. Sure, navy and forest are very different shades. So are emerald and sapphire. But where do you place turquoise? […]

Astronomers have been able to catch the earliest phases of supernova explosions with one of the most powerful observatories on Earth. These incredible observations have provided our first look at what the shape of a supernova is. It turns out, they are not really spherical. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please […]

Earth’s atmosphere is opaque to X-rays, which is probably good news for life on this planet. It is not good news for astronomers, however, because that means the best way for them to see high-energy events like black holes and neutron stars is to send a telescope into space. A bit easier than that is […]

In the deserts of Nevada, a US startup has achieved cold criticality, a bold step in the development of a functional commercial nuclear reactor. It’s the first time a venture-backed startup has ever done this, and the company argues that its success marks “the dawn of a new era” in the US’s efforts to spark […]

The kodkod (Leopardus guigna), also known as the guiña, is the smallest cat in the Americas. Typically found in Chile, this shy species is nocturnal, hunting under the cover of vegetation.   The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. What does a kodkod […]

Incredible footage from British Columbia shows what may be the first ever instance of tool use by wild wolves. In the recordings, two wolves can be seen pulling on crab trap lines in order to access tasty bait, and while this behavior clearly shows a sophisticated level of cognition, there is some debate over whether […]

Something’s up with raccoons. Scientists have recently reported that those living in US cities have evolved much shorter snouts than their rural counterparts, a sure sign that urban “trash pandas” have self-domesticated in response to human presence. Biologists from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock studied thousands of images of North American raccoons (Procyon […]

Everything we see in the universe and everything we interact with is made of matter. At a fundamental level, though, the particles that make us have twins of the same mass but with opposite charge. This is antimatter. We do not know why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter, but there must […]

For the very first time, scientists have spotted a living ginkgo-toothed beaked whale, a rare, deep-diving species that until this sighting had previously only been known from a handful of strandings. These elusive whales were only described for the first time in 1958, after one became stranded on a beach near Tokyo. That ended up […]

In a single decade, we have gone from the first-ever gravitational wave detection to several hundred of them. Every time there is a new possible detection, an alert is sent out, so observatories around the world can try to catch a possible light counterpart to such an event. One such alert caught the eye of […]

Eels are perhaps one of the most mysterious of the well-known fish; they might even be mistaken for the Loch Ness Monster. They have a complex catadromous life cycle, spending time in fresh and saltwater. But what is a baby eel called? The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or […]

The astonishingly well-preserved nasal cavity of a Neanderthal in Italy has finally settled one of the great debates in palaeoanthropology by completely contradicting our assumptions regarding the facial anatomy of our extinct relative. Previously, scientists thought that Neanderthals possessed specific structures in their noses that helped them deal with cold environments, yet we now know […]

Researchers might have found some of the oldest evidence of an oxygen-producing lifeform in rocks, from samples that are at least 2.5 billion years old, as well as biological signatures in 3.3 billion-year-old material, among the oldest known. This fresh chemical evidence found in these rocks was discovered thanks to machine learning algorithms that have […]

This unassuming lump of clay may be an avant-garde masterpiece of the prehistoric age, centuries ahead of any other artwork. The 3.7-centimeter-tall (1.5-inch) artifact was discovered at Nahal Ein Gev II, an archaeological site in modern-day northern Israel near the Sea of Galilee. Dating to over 12,000 years, it was recently unearthed by archaeologists at […]

The African penguin (Spheniscus demersus) is critically endangered due to environmental changes and human activity, both of which have contributed to food shortages. Now, new research has found that plummeting fish stocks are putting these penguins in direct competition with fishing vessels. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or […]

Parasitic ants have developed a method to take over colonies with rulers too strong to defeat by direct attack. They use a chemical spray to sow divisions within the colony, creating the circumstances where they can seize control themselves. Many humans have considered themselves very clever for turning their enemies against each other, allowing them […]

The European Space Agency (ESA) has used images taken by the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter while interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS was hidden from earthly observers by the Sun to refine calculations of the comet’s orbit. The work not only improves our understanding of the visitor, but could improve predictions of objects on a potential collision course […]

China has hit the jackpot, once again, after discovering one of the largest deposits of gold ever recorded in the country’s history. Off the back of surging gold prices, the discovery could be worth upwards of $192 billion. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the […]

You will soon have the opportunity to see interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS for yourself, as it is observed live by the Virtual Telescope Project this week.  As you are probably aware by now, this year has brought our third interstellar visitor that we know of. On July 1, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) detected […]