News

The largest prime number ever discovered has been found by an amateur mathematician using Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS). Prime numbers, as you likely learned in school, are numbers that can only be divided by one and themselves. There are an infinite number of them, with all numbers greater than 1 being either a […]

Two cities that flourished as part of the Silk Road have been mapped though drone-borne LiDAR, revealing them as two of the largest cities on the mountainous part of that world-changing path, or indeed anywhere at such altitude. The Silk Road helped make the modern world, allowing not just goods but technologies and ideas to […]

The decomposition ecosystem makes quick work of our corpses when we die, letting loose a rich diversity of microbes and luring in flies from miles away. It’s a handy process for getting rid of carcasses out in the wild, but it can cause problems depending on the kind of funeral you’re after. Humans have a […]

An X-ray binary system composed of a black hole and a star in the process of being consumed turns out to have a third member circling. Unless some unlikely scenarios occurred, the existence of what the discoverers are calling a “black hole triple” indicates a previously unseen method for making black holes. Since we can’t […]

We humans really did something when we learned how to resuscitate people who had gone into cardiac arrest, because (by our understanding of biology at the time, at least) it meant we had learned how to bring people back from the dead. They may have been without a heartbeat for only a matter of seconds, […]

At the start of June 2024, China’s Chang’e 6 lunar probe successfully touched down on the far side of the Moon, landing softly near the lunar south pole. Its main mission, which it performed alongside various side quests, was to study and return the first-ever samples from the Moon’s far side. It did so, bringing […]

R/P FLIP, quite possibly one of the strangest maritime engineering feats ever built, has been saved from the scrapyard at the eleventh hour. Also known as the FLoating Instrument Platform, FLIP is 108-meter (355-foot) long oceanic research platform that can be partially flooded and flipped by 90 degrees, allowing it to stand vertically in the […]

Entropy is one of those concepts that is so fundamental that it needs to be explained far and wide in accessible terms, but has consequences that baffle us when we think about it for a while. It is the measure of disorder of a system, and in an isolated system – such as the universe […]

A team looking into dark energy and the holographic principle have modeled what the end of the universe may look like, assuming that the universe is a hologram after all. As with a lot of the stranger hypotheses about the universe, the holographic principle has its roots in the theoretical study of black holes. Tackling […]

A communications satellite has been lost in Earth’s geostationary orbit, breaking up into several pieces of debris after an “anomaly” occurred over the weekend. Intelsat 33e, also known as IS-33e, was reported to be out of service on Saturday, October 19, leading to a loss of power and service to customers across Europe, Africa, and […]

The Atacama Desert in Chile is a harsh environment. Yet, once upon a time, humans were traipsing across the landscape committing enormous drawings to the earth – drawings that would endure for thousands of years. Today we know them as geoglyphs, and while they’re found in various sites across the globe, Atacama is home to […]

Spot a funnel emerging from the bottom of a cloud and you’d be forgiven for feeling like you might need to start legging it towards the nearest sturdy building. However, if it looks like it’s struggling to reach the ground, you’re not necessarily about to witness a tornado – it could be a cold air […]

Six complete eggs have been found in a partially preserved clutch in the Ganzhou Basin, China, which the discovery team report are the smallest dinosaur eggs ever found – at least if you don’t count modern birds. Features besides size indicate these are from a different species than any eggs we have seen before. The […]

When it comes to toughness, jade sits at the top of the hardy gemstone list. This might be surprising if you’ve heard that diamonds are the hardest, so which is the strongest? For gemstones, it all comes down to whether a stone is more resistant to scratching or breaking.   Jade has been an important material […]

Evolution is a constant process, and humans are still changing as we adapt to the various environments we inhabit. Some of the best places to see this is in the harshest places, as demonstrated by a new study linking increased oxygen delivery and number of live births in native ethnic Tibetan women living at high […]

A snow day is always an exciting day (ok, less so as an adult who has to actually do things), but now imagine a snow day where you wake up and the fields are covered in white, cinnamon roll or donut-esque cylinders. No, snowmen haven’t become sentient and had their own Bake Off technical challenge […]

Venus is the world next door. An Earth-sized planet that couldn’t be less like Earth, it is a hellish world with acid clouds. Several missions are planning to go there over the next decade, including NASA’s DAVINCI, which will drop a probe into the atmosphere. The goal will be to study the atmosphere and the […]

Back in 2008, a miniature mystery unfolded at Sea Star Aquarium in Coburg, Germany. Staff turned up for work in the morning to find the aquarium was eerily silent and dark. It transpired that the entire building’s electrical system had short-circuited. The technical difficulties were fixed until the problem was reported the following morning. And […]

They say it’s only by being wrong that we learn what’s right, and in the field of forensics, scientists had to learn the hard way that you can’t catch criminals by taking out eyeballs. The working theory was that the human retina could capture the last thing a person saw by locking it in photosensitive […]

In the worlds of extinct elephant species and ancient humans, the science powers that be have granted us a rare double whammy. Not only have researchers identified the remains of an ancient elephant species from some pretty incredible fossils, but those fossils have revealed how they might have provided a food source to early humans […]