News

Atmospheric rivers have been gaining a lot of media traction lately. But while atmospheric rivers have played an integral role in the water cycle long before the birth of the dinosaurs, the term was first described surprisingly recently – in 1994. It refers to the long, narrow columns of water vapor that flow through the […]

While AI may be more commonly used for stealing art and hallucinating bullshit – that’s a technical term, by the way – the last couple of years have also seen what seem to be some genuinely extraordinary feats from the nascent technology. And that’s particularly true in the field of math: where computers were once […]

Imagine walking down a dark corridor, filled with looming shadows and jump scares at every corner. Your heart is rapidly beating in your chest, and you feel twitchy and ready to flee at a moment’s notice. Then suddenly a person dripping in “blood” rushes towards you carrying a loud chainsaw. You are in a haunted […]

Many people scoff at the sheer speed with which Snow White and her prince realized they were made for each other, or at The Little Mermaid‘s Ariel for tripping over her as-yet-imaginary feet to sign a dodgy contract in pursuit of a man she’d spent about eight seconds with. But if you think Jack and […]

Some animals have a “third eye”, and some spiders have as many as eight, but what about bees? A quick glance might lead you to answer “two”, and two pretty massive ones at that, but first impressions can be deceiving. How many eyes do bees have? Bees actually have five eyes: two compound eyes and […]

There’s lots of water in Antarctica, but most of it is frozen. You’d be forgiven, then, for thinking that rivers aren’t really a thing on the continent – however, you’d be mistaken. Antarctica is home to a number of waterways (at least for a few months a year) – the longest of which, called the […]

Located in one of the most remote corners of the Central Pacific is a small, uninhabited coral reef island known as Palmyra Atoll. Composed of 50 islets measuring no more than 2 meters (7 feet) in elevation, the U-shaped Palmyra Atoll is surrounded by 6,475 hectares (16,000 acres) of shallow and submerged barrier reefs.  One […]

On the jagged coast of Scotland lies an island that has stood deserted for decades, haunted by its legacy as a biological warfare testing ground during World War II. Gruinard Island is around 2 kilometers (1.25 miles) long and a short boat ride from the shore of Ross-shire in the Inner Hebrides of western Scotland. […]

Art critics of the world, look out – a pigeon might just be coming for your job. Well, if you’re in the business of deciding if a child’s artwork is good or bad at least, because that’s exactly what one scientist trained a bunch of pigeons to do. Watanabe Shigeru, a Professor Emeritus in psychology […]

Hundreds of scientists have gathered for an “emergency summit” in Australia to discuss the imperiled future of Antarctica. Concluding their findings in a statement published today, the polar researchers have a stark message: urgent action is needed to prevent the melting of Antarctica and catastrophic sea level rises around the world. “Nowhere on Earth is […]

A zircon crystal blasted off the face of Mars before landing on Earth as part of one of the most unusual meteorites ever found has revealed the oldest evidence of water on Mars. Moreover, it has shown that this water sometimes combined with sources of heat, presumably from volcanic activity, similar to those some think […]

Eat lots of fruits and vegetables, take regular exercise, and don’t smoke – probably the three most common health messages we all hear. The fact that smoking tobacco is a major risk factor for lung cancer – as well as numerous other diseases – is so well accepted now that it’s hard to imagine a […]

Not to sound superstitious or anything, but yet another oarfish has washed up in California. In early November 2024, Scripps Oceanography PhD candidate Alison Laferriere came across a dead oarfish, measuring roughly 2.7 to 3 meters (9 to 10 feet) in length, that had washed up on Grandview Beach in Encinitas.  The discovery follows at […]

This week on Break It Down, astronomers have taken the first-ever close-up photo of a star outside of the Milky Way, putting weight back on after losing it could be down to your fat cells’ “memories”, the mystery surrounding the Earth’s inner core “freezing”, footage shows a “giant” virus infecting a cell for the first […]

The oldest firearm ever discovered in the continental US has been found at the site of a massacre that occurred in Arizona in 1541. Brought to America by the Spanish conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, the bronze cannon was supposed to protect the residents of the first European settlement in the American Southwest, most of […]

Legends tell of gold-hungry Conquistadors encountering a steaming river of boiling water within the depths of the Amazon rainforest. Surprisingly, this sensational tale holds a remarkable degree of truth. The unbelievably hot waters of Peru’s Shanay-timpishka – also known as La Bomba or simply the Boiling River – have been known to Indigenous Amazonian communities […]

It’s one of those hidden-in-plain-sight rules of life: the opposite faces of standard dice always sum to seven. Six is opposite one; five is opposite two; three is opposite four. It’s just how it is. But have you ever wondered why? It wasn’t always such a given. High and late medieval dice were often designed […]

If you found yourself on Google’s homepage yesterday, you would have noticed that there was a fun little card game in which you match cute cards and learn about the lunar cycle. This is the name for how the Moon’s appearance changes over a month, or specifically, the 29.5 days of its orbit around the […]

There is still plenty to learn about the pyramids of Egypt. For instance, it would be nice to know what is in the massive void sealed inside the Great Pyramid of Giza 4,500 years ago, or precisely how the materials were transported to the area before construction. But let’s start with the basics: how many […]

The transition from symbols like hieroglyphics to writing may have happened much earlier than had been thought, an archaeologist has claimed. However, if the evidence stands up to scrutiny, it poses the question of why one of humanity’s greatest inventions appears to have taken so long to gain widespread use. There’s probably no way to […]