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This week in Break It Down: Earth’s about to get a new mini-moon (if only for a while), ancient rock art may have been based on an extinct fossil, a “third state” identified between life and death, a truly supermassive black hole with jets spanning 23 million light-years, there’s a new blood group, and the […]

With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), spy satellite images from the Cold War are revealing the engineering mastery of ancient civilizations in the Middle East and North Africa.  Advertisement In a new study, researchers at the Catalan Institute of Classical Archaeology have tested out a creative way to search for qanats, a system that […]

Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) is just a day away from its closest encounter with the Sun and it is getting brighter. It has now crossed the brightness threshold to be visible to the naked eye. While from Earth it is still just a fuzzy dot without help, with a modest magnification you can see its […]

Ask a child to draw water and, armed with crayons, they will make it blue. However, many adults would consider water to be colorless. The blue hue that large bodies of water have is not simply a reflection of the sky or light scattering on the surface – the kids are right, water is ever […]

The Ocean Photographer Of The Year winners have been announced, and among the many categories you can spot some truly wild animal behavior. The jack fish in the above photo hasn’t been eaten, and nor has the jellyfish become its dinner.  In the deep and dangerous sea, these two animals have formed a curious symbiosis […]

Throughout the relatively short history of the US, it’s become a tradition that presidents have their coffins draped in the American flag at their funeral. Of the 39 US presidents who have died, all have received this burial rite – except one: John Tyler, the 10th president of the US, who was laid to rest […]

Researchers looking for objects in the Kuiper Belt – the donut-shaped region beyond the orbit of Neptune containing icy objects including dwarf planet Pluto – appear to have found 11 objects far beyond it. It could be a major discovery – revealing, among other things, that the Solar System is much larger than we thought. […]

Astronomers have found an incredible gravitational lens. Thanks to a chance alignment, a foreground cluster of galaxies has magnified the light of not one, but seven background galaxies, creating a gravitational lens that has been described as “most exquisitely aligned”. It has been dubbed the Carousel Lens. Advertisement Gravitational lenses are created by the gravity […]

Stupendously rare footage of a bigfin squid, known for its alien-like appearance and unbelievably long tentacles, has been captured in the dark depths of the Pacific Ocean. Advertisement The video was recently shot by scientists from Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Centre and Inkfish as part of the ongoing Tonga Trench Expedition 2024. From July until October […]

A study published in July of this year sent shockwaves through the scientific community by claiming that metallic nodules in the deep ocean have the capacity to split seawater and produce oxygen. Now, however, the sensational discovery has come under scrutiny as researchers pick holes in the original findings, arguing that this so-called “dark oxygen” […]

It often feels like conservative and liberal voters have next to nothing in common, and it turns out their differences extend right down to the structures in their brains. While in the past much has been made of these contrasts, a new study has found that they’re less extensive than many believe – but they […]

The first in-depth global analysis of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) forecasts over 39 million deaths from infections by 2050 if more is not done to combat the problem. The global research team looked at data from over 200 countries between 1990 to 2021 to inform their modeling.  “It is important to understand that AMR is not […]

We have known about the phenomenon of static electricity since at least the time of Aristotle. Aristotle credits fellow philosopher Thales of Miletus, who lived between 640 and 546 BCE, with the discovery that amber picks up pieces of dried grass after it has been rubbed with a cloth. Advertisement For a very long time, […]

A team of archaeologists believes they have finally solved the mystery of the lead sarcophagi found beneath Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. Advertisement After the famous Cathedral burned to the ground in 2019, a number of incredible finds were made beneath the scorched ruins. Among them were two unusual lead sarcophagi, buried beneath the cathedral hundreds […]

There are all sorts of creatures lurking in the oceans, seas, and even rivers of planet Earth. From funky, purple sea slugs to backward-traveling isopods, the saltwater environment contains creatures that seem to be straight out of a fantasy film. One such creature is the tasselled wobbegong, and while it has a name to match its […]

An artificial intelligence (AI) tool that’s being compared to “Shazam for whales” has cracked an ongoing mystery at the Mariana Trench. A bizarre sound, source unknown, had been ringing out in this stretch of the Pacific, puzzling scientists. At last, we know it’s a Bryde’s whale. Advertisement The moaning was first detected back in 2014 […]

A team of researchers has proposed an experiment to finally catch a glimpse of the elusive “graviton”, if it does actually exist.  Advertisement We can see the effects of gravity pretty easily, just by looking at the movements of the stars and the planets through a telescope. Or if you can’t be bothered to set […]

Russian scientists have recently studied a 32,400-year-old woolly rhinoceros that’s been preserved in permafrost like a prehistoric popsicle, revealing a bunch of new insights into the extinct species.  Advertisement The frozen carcass of the woolly rhino was unearthed in the summer of 2020 near the banks of the Tirekhtyakh River in Russia’s far eastern Sakha […]

Most US citizens underestimate the scale of inequality in their country, or at least their county, by greatly underestimating the income of the richest 1 percent. The result is consistent across four studies that challenged participants to estimate incomes at particular points in the social spread. The authors speculate that people simply don’t want to […]