News

A portion of our genome that was once dismissed as being “junk” may actually play an important role in regulating gene expression, new research suggests. According to the work of an international team of scientists, the “junk” has actually evolved to influence how genes are turned on and off, especially during early human development. The […]

The ocean holds all sorts of differently shaped delights, from colorful starfish to life that is a little more… blobby. Now, impressive drone footage has provided a rare glimpse at one of the most triangular beings in the ocean: the wedgefish. Wildlife videographer Jake Mason was flying his drone off in Shark Bay off the […]

The universe began in an event we call the Big Bang around 13.8 billion years ago. Humanity has been able to understand a lot of what has happened since and where the universe is going, but we do not know exactly how it is going to end. A new study suggests that the cosmos might […]

A melting glacier has pulled back the veil on a prehistoric whale graveyard in Russia. Scientists at Russia’s Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) recently found the gathering of whale skeletons on Wilczek Island in the Franz Josef Land archipelago, northern Russia, during the study of the region’s permafrost. “Having compared the current position of […]

A study analyzing JWST observations of the early universe has uncovered an intriguing mystery: most galaxies appear to be rotating in the same direction. This unexpected pattern, which defies current cosmological models, has led the study’s authors to propose a bold possibility: that our universe might exist inside a black hole. The JWST has allowed […]

Since his discovery in 1991, Ötzi, the famous mummified Iceman found frozen in the Ötztal Alps, has been offering all sorts of insights into the Neolithic past. Now scientists have turned to his neighbors to see if their DNA can offer even more information about ancient people living in this region at the time. The […]

The BASE collaboration within the Antimatter Factory at CERN is having an exciting year. Not only are they getting ready to transport antimatter around the facility on the back of a van, but they have also demonstrated for the first time a quantum bit or qubit (the fundamental processing unit of a quantum computer) using […]

Ever wondered what it would look like if you could combine the features of a rat, a skunk, and a porcupine? Well, wonder no more, because nature has already dished up such a creature: the African crested rat (Lophiomys imhausi). It looks endearingly bonkers, but don’t be fooled. This maned rodent has a toxic trick […]

A new experiment involving a network of entangled atomic clocks could finally help us test how quantum mechanics fits with general relativity. Quantum mechanics is our best understanding of the universe at atomic and subatomic scales. With it, we have revolutionized our understanding of physics on teeny tiny scales. General relativity – first outlined by […]

Astronomers report the discovery of 17 different complex organic molecules around protostar V883 Orionis. They also report the first tentative detection of ethylene glycol and glycolonitrile, which are precursors to crucial building blocks of life such as the amino acids glycine and alanine, as well as the nucleobase adenine found in both DNA and RNA. […]

In a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, fusion startup Marathon claims that they have come up with a method for turning mercury into gold. There is an old joke that fusion is always 30 years away. After being proposed in the 1950s as a solution to our energy needs, we have still not found a way to make […]

What do you think of when you imagine a hyena? A cackling, meat-eating character, right? Turns out, they’re not all like that. Like any family, there’s one member of the hyena clan that’s something of an oddball – the aardwolf (Proteles cristatus). The name might conjure up images of the cursed result of an experiment […]

To misquote Hamlet, there seems to be more types of planets across the heavens than have been dreamt in our astronomy before the advent of dedicated planet-hunting telescopes. In the Solar System, we have rocky worlds, dwarf planets, gas giants, and icy giants. Beyond, we find super-Earths, sub-Neptunes, hot Jupiters, and more. Now, astronomers have […]

Dogs are great judges of character, right? That’s certainly what lots of people think anyway. If dogs gravitate towards someone then that person must be safe and trustworthy, but if the pooch gets protective then perhaps that someone is untrustworthy. But whether or not this is true and how, if at all, dogs socially evaluate […]

As the search for life on Mars continues – with the Mars Sample Return program set to return samples of the planet in the early 2030s – one scientist has suggested that we may have already found life on the Red Planet, almost 50 years ago. And then, in what would not be an all-time […]

A late Cretaceous trackway in Canada contains the footprints of at least nine dinosaurs from four species. Two of the trackmakers were large tyrannosaurs, which may have sparked the motions of the other dinosaurs, or happened to be nearby a few hours earlier or later. However, while that part of the puzzle remains unsolved, the […]

For the first time in 80 years, a new generation of fully-fledged aspen trees has grown in Yellowstone’s northern range. According to a new study, the reason for the success is thanks to the wolves that were reintroduced into the national park in the 1990s.  Wolves were eradicated in Yellowstone by humans in the early […]

From CCTV and smartphones to dashcams and smart doorbells, cameras follow your every step in the 21st century. While the constant threat of ever-watching eyes may be turning us into a self-conscious surveillance society, it does make for some interesting science occasionally. Case in point: a security camera in Myanmar captured something never before seen […]

Join us as we dive into a fascinating ocean mystery: a massive, unidentified object discovered by explorers on the floor of the Baltic Sea. In one (admittedly blurry) sonar image, it bears an uncanny resemblance to the Millennium Falcon from above. Most intriguingly, the team that found it in 2011 noted it appeared to rest […]

Humanity has successfully landed probes on Mars and Venus, two of the four rocky planets of the Solar System. While a mission to Mercury, being so close to the Sun and nearly as hot as Venus, is a tricky goal for future operations, if it has a rocky surface, human scientists will find a way […]