News

This week on Break It Down: orcas disable another boat as a new theory is put forward for the behavior, bacteria pass “memories” of perturbed genes to descendants, SETI scans 2,880 galaxies for advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, what you need to know about human parvovirus B19, flying spaghetti monsters sighted on a sea mount expedition, and […]

In 1931, at the age of 28, Louis Leakey made his first trip to Olduvai Gorge, in what is now Tanzania. His goal: to prove that Africa – specifically East Africa, where he had been born and grown up – was the so-called “cradle of humanity”. It was, he had been told, a fool’s errand. […]

It was the writer Edgar Allan Poe who first proposed a solution to Olber’s paradox: why is the sky dark at night? The reason for the darkness of the night is to be found in the fact that our cosmos has limits, at the very least in time. Since then, astronomers have been searching for […]

A newly developed material may be about to revolutionize solar energy. Created using what the researchers call a “multi-junction” approach, the material is already more efficient than many traditional solar panels – while simultaneously being thin and flexible enough to be incorporated into everyday objects. Advertisement As the scholars Flansburgh and Linnell famously explained:  “The […]

The Earth has an electric field that allows atmospheric particles to escape near the poles. Yet despite the concept being proposed around the time humans were first reaching space, it’s never been verified, let alone measured, until now. In the course of a suborbital flight, NASA’s Endurance rocket has done both. Advertisement Planetary scientists proposed […]

Does your cat’s big fat belly appear to comedically swing from side to side when it walks or runs? You might just be looking at its primordial pouch, which, despite looking completely ridiculous, provides your feisty feline with a complex evolutionary advantage. All cats – male or female, neutered or intact – have a primordial […]

As the search for ever-more sources of clean, renewable energy continues, it seems like there’s one resource we’ve forgotten to tap into. Not for nothing is Earth known as the “Blue Planet” – with more than 70 percent of the globe being covered by seas and oceans, is there no way we could harness the […]

Between 23 and 11.6 million years ago, an unlucky sea cow had a very bad day. It got munched on by not one, but two types of carnivores as it became dinner for both a shark and some kind of ancient crocodilian. The most unfortunate of sandwiches. Advertisement The gruesome scene has been pieced together […]

The US Bureau of Reclamation has come up with a plan to prevent invasive smallmouth bass from taking over the Grand Canyon, and it involves turning down the temperature. Advertisement Smallmouth bass are typically native to the eastern and central United States, but they are also highly effective predators that love nothing more than chowing […]

Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) has been a right tease. Back in May, it looked on the way to brightening steadily and becoming visible to the naked eye by October – however, in July, a paper pointed out several unusual features that suggested the comet might not survive the close encounter with the Sun in less […]

A pod of orcas has taken out a boat off the coast of Spain, damaging the rudder to such an extent that the two-person crew were stranded off Cape Finisterre. That’s according to a statement emailed to the New York Times by their rescuers – and given recent events, it’s not all that surprising. Advertisement […]

Science fiction has its fair share of galaxy-spanning civilizations. From the United Federation of Planets to the Galactic Empire, from the rule of Paul Atreides to that of Cleon II, we have fantasized about people spreading across the vast gulf of space and building a galactic culture. Could such a thing exist in real life? […]

The Vikings are renowned for their violent raids on foreign lands, yet new research suggests that murder and bloodthirst were not the norm across all of Scandinavia. Comparing the levels of violence evidenced by Viking-Age skeletons in Norway and Denmark, the study authors found that interpersonal attacks were far more common in the northern realm, […]

The locations of “knot-like structures” in the human genome have been mapped for the first time. Known as i-motifs, these odd shapes were reported to exist in 1993, but initially treated with suspicion. The discovery of how frequent they are, and their locations, suggests they play important roles in our health, but can also lead […]

Wildlife Photographer Of The Year is back for its 60th anniversary and ahead of the big competition announcement, they’ve released some of the highly commended images for 2024. Among the photos we’re treated to the world’s grumpiest cat, the many talents of jackdaws, a picture-perfect forest scene, an army of mussels, and a baby manatee […]

Although we might blithely refer to the last glacial period as “the Ice Age”, temperatures varied a lot. This affected humanity even in the tropics, but in a bitterly cold Europe changes were much more likely to be a matter of life and death. A new way of analyzing fossil teeth from the era gives […]

A Falcon 9 rocket had an unexpected failure on August 28 when the booster rocket landed following its trip to space. There were no injuries since it landed at sea on an autonomous barge, but the Federal Aviation Administration has grounded the rocket pending an investigation, and SpaceX postponed a second launch scheduled for last […]

A new seamount and 20 potentially new-to-science species have been discovered off the coast of Chile during an expedition to map uncharted parts of the seafloor. Armed with their trusty ROV SuBastian, the clever folks over at Schmidt Ocean Institute were surveying the unnamed and unexplored seamount when they spotted two flying spaghetti monsters. Don’t […]

An adult in New Hampshire, USA has died after contracting Eastern Equine Encephalitis virus (EEEV), the first human case of the disease reported in the state for a decade. Advertisement EEEV, sometimes known as “Triple E”, is a rare infection in humans – only 11 cases are detected in the USA per year, on average. […]

In a big result for “Isn’t it crazy what science can figure out?!” news, researchers from the University of Liverpool have revealed the evolution and incredible destruction wrought by a gigantic underwater avalanche nearly 60,000 years ago. Advertisement The team used more than 300 core samples, taken from the seafloor of the Atlantic Ocean off […]