News

This week on Break It Down: lasers revealed 1,200-year-old mummies’ sweet tats, the mission to de-extinct the thylacine takes a leap forward, video footage of a meteorite hitting someone’s garden might be a world first, China announces plans to build the solar power station equivalent of “Three Gorges Dam” in space, researchers discover an Iron […]

Radio waves have been detected from what appears to be a pulsar, with just one problem – it‘s spinning thousands of times more slowly than most such objects, and hundreds of times slower than theory says is possible. Several similar signals have been found recently, but this is the most extreme yet, and also presents […]

Fancy a game of pin the ears on a bird? Alright then, big shot, where are they? Birds use sound as one of their key senses for navigating the environment, but most of them are a bit secretive about where they’re storing them. Working out the positioning can depend on the species, and some have […]

A brand new species of cat has been found in a fossil from a cave in China. Reportedly small enough to have fit in the palm of your hand, the cat – named Prionailurus kurteni – is thought to have coexisted alongside ancient people. Advertisement Prionailurus kurteni was discovered from a fragment of jaw bone in […]

Just like smoking on planes and people dressing smartly for their flights, “airplane mode” has been consigned to aviation history in the European Union (EU). So why is it still a thing in the US and many other parts of the world? Advertisement In 2022, the European Commission issued new rules that said carriers can […]

Have you ever forgotten what you were doing as you moved from one room to another? Maybe you’re in one room and remember you need to do something or fetch an item from another room. However, by the time you arrive in the other room, the thought has completely gone and you no longer recall […]

Using a non-invasive method of analysis, researchers have discovered that the pieces making up the famous Pompeii mosaic of Alexander the Great came from a network of quarries across Europe. Advertisement Alexander the Great is remembered today for his military conquests and empire-expanding activities (and perhaps for being the main character in that 2004 movie […]

Andromeda is the closest large galaxy to the Milky Way. And it is getting closer, as the two will merge in several billion years. It has been an object of study for centuries, but we have never seen it like this. The Hubble Space Telescope has just finished a campaign of observations that lasted for […]

For the first time, researchers have found evidence that people were using red ochre in West Africa during the Middle Stone Age. Dated to between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago, the rust-colored artifacts appear to have been crushed into powder and used as “crayons”. Advertisement According to the study authors, the presence or absence of […]

Geologists don’t have a crystal ball that can foresee future earthquakes, but seismic specialists in the Japanese government believe that the odds of a big one are creeping upwards. According to Japan’s Earthquake Research Committee, there’s an 80 percent chance that a megaquake could occur in the Nankai Trough within the next 30 years. That’s […]

The World Monuments Fund (WMF) has just announced its biennial list of 25 cultural heritage sites that are under threat – and for the first time ever, it’s gone lunar. Advertisement The preservation organization’s list, the World Monuments Watch, usually sticks to cultural heritage sites within Earth’s bounds. However, with humanity recently ramping up (uncrewed, […]

There are concepts in physics that you probably shouldn’t claim to know until you’ve studied them in depth. Don’t believe us? Tell a physicist you understand quantum mechanics after watching a video about Schrödinger’s cat on YouTube. Advertisement But straws, surely, aren’t that difficult to understand? Suck on one end, liquid comes out? Well, it’s […]

Rare and endangered animals are often hidden away in hard-to-reach locations and might require trekking through a jungle or hacking through thick vegetation to catch a glimpse. Their limited populations sometimes only live in one specific area – and for the world’s rarest insect, this is a small, uninhabited sea stack in the Pacific Ocean. […]

Astronomers have announced the discovery of three new ultra-faint dwarf galaxies, the likes of which have not been seen before. These galaxies are small and isolated, with just a few hundred to a thousand stars and no gas. This is dramatically different from our massive galaxy, which has around a hundred billion stars and is […]

You ever notice how you spend most of your time with only a few of your friends? Or how, at work, it always seems like most of your colleagues don’t really do much, and the whole company would probably flounder if not for you and like, three other people? Advertisement How about your gadgets? They […]

If you’ve ever had a cat, you might have heard your veterinarian mention “cat flu”, probably telling you that you don’t need to worry about catching Felix’s sniffles. It’s true that the infections we traditionally call “cat flu” aren’t transmissible to humans – but what about actual influenza viruses? Are our feline friends vulnerable to […]

For those of us with siblings, the thought that our parents might secretly favor one over the rest has probably crossed our minds at least once. But it can’t be true, right? Wrong – and new research has also explored what might make a child more likely to be the favorite. Advertisement To do so, […]

At 2:03 am EST on January 16, Blue Origin’s New Glenn lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The rocket is 98 meters (322 feet) tall, among the tallest around, and this first launch was a demonstration as part of the US Space Force’s National Security Space Launch program. It tested the Blue Ring […]

A lot of work has explored the noses of dogs, and rats have even been trained to sniff out illegally tracked wildlife – however, most research on smelling focuses on mammals and insects, not spiders. An orb-weaving spider species was specially chosen as the subject of a new study because the females emit sex hormones […]

A massive release of sulfur has been largely blamed for the dramatic cooling that followed Chicxulub’s crash landing, but did it really happen like we thought it did? A new study is raising questions about the long-held belief that an eruption of sulfur (among other things) triggered a severe and lasting “impact winter”, arguing that […]