News

Sometimes the differences between related species are just as impressive as the animals themselves. Take the bats, for instance. From the truly enormous hammerhead bat that slurps up fruits, to bats found doing the deed without penetration, the world’s only flying mammals have enormous species breadth. In the rainforest of Honduras, for example, you’ll find […]

Over the last several months, the most distant human-made object has been in trouble: Voyager 1 was still in communication with Earth, but scientists were receiving nothing but binary gibberish. The situation looked extremely serious – so serious that might have spelled the end of the decade-long mission. But thanks to hard work, the team […]

When you think “cells” you generally also think “microscopic”, but sometimes evolution likes to take things in a different direction. It’s hard to believe from looking at it, but this green alga, Caulerpa taxifolia is an organism composed of one single cell – the biggest one on the planet. Also known by the sinister moniker […]

Imagine having fun in the bedroom, then one wrong move and the person with the penis may be crying out in pain rather than pleasure. Numerous injuries can occur during sexual activity and – one that is cringe-worthy is the snapping of the banjo string. What is a banjo string? The banjo string is another […]

The best chance to find life on another planet is not to seek out a pale blue dot, nor worlds of forest green, a new paper argues. Instead, we need to be looking out for purple planets, the argument goes, because that is the shade life is likely to show for the longest time. If […]

The winners of the 2023 CUPOTY Challenge: Water have been revealed, with this year’s top prize being swooped by Hungarian photographer Tibor Litauszki for a beautifully lit image of a newt enjoying a midnight feast of frogspawn. “In Germany, where I live, there are many clear and slow-flowing streams that provide excellent habitat for alpine […]

The World Health Organization (WHO) has published a new report that provides, for the first time, a unified definition of what it means when a disease is spread through the air. The WHO worked with four major global health agencies in consultation with dozens of individual experts to compile the report, which should help avoid […]

There are few things more appealing than young fluffy animals. From kittens to puppies they are guaranteed to make people say “aww”. However, when it comes to the wild version of young animals they are always best admired from a distance. In an incident in North Carolina, a group of people were witnessed and filmed […]

Do we all have a universal perception of time? There’s a lot that scientists just don’t know about this concept, but some have suggested that humans all share an “internal clock” that tells us how much time has passed. However, a new study has added evidence to the contrary, showing how altering an environment can […]

To many, the Voynich Manuscript represents a 600-year-old mystery. The medieval text is filled with bizarre illustrations and is written in a hitherto indecipherable language. But for all its enigmatic features, two scholars believe they have solved at least one: the manuscript, they argue, is at least partially about sex. A weird manuscript The manuscript […]

In the jungles of Indonesia, a camera trap has captured footage of a Javan rhinoceros calf, one of the rarest and most threatened large mammals on planet Earth. Spotted alongside its mother, the Javan rhino calf was spotted in Indonesia’s Ujung Kulon National Park on the morning of March 4, 2024. The calf is estimated […]

Inside your chest is a gnarly-looking, asymmetrical lump of muscle that is devoid of emotion and horrifically unromantic. Despite this, we persist in using an anatomically incorrect “heart” shape to depict the coronary organ, which we erroneously imbue with sentimental characteristics. Exactly where this scallop-shaped cliche originates is not entirely certain, although the authors of […]

Last month, a pallet of batteries discarded from the International Space Station (ISS) fell down to Earth. It mostly burned up in the atmosphere or crashed into the Atlantic but a piece of it fell through the house of Alejandro Otero in Florida who, thanks to social media, was able to contact NASA and get […]

A team of researchers say they have found the “strongest statistical evidence yet that Planet 9 is really out there” in the solar system after studying a population of distant, unstable objects that cross Neptune’s orbit. When it comes to discovering planets, finding them around other stars is actually a little easier than locating them […]

In the first episode of Amazon’s new TV series Fallout, one of the main characters – played by Walton Goggins – mentions a “rule of thumb” about nuclear blasts. According to the character known as The Ghoul, during military training he was taught that if you extend your arm and raise your thumb in the direction […]

Consciousness in the animal kingdom may be far more wide-reaching than previously thought, according to a number of animal cognition experts. In a recent declaration, they argue that all sorts of animals – from fish to insects – may be sentient, and that this should inform our treatment of such animals going forward. Previous research […]

NASA’s Juno has recently performed some extremely close flybys of Io, the innermost of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter. The natural satellite is the most geologically active body in the Solar System, featuring 400 active volcanoes. Members of the Juno team have used data from recent encounters to reconstruct some intriguing features on the […]

Two hunters in the US have died of a rare prion disease, an aggressive disorder of the central nervous system that’s caused by strange, rogue proteins. Worryingly, scientists are speculating that the pair caught the disease from North American deer infected with Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD). If true, it would be the first known case […]

An event that is only known to have happened three times before in the history of life on Earth has just been documented again. A marine bacterium was subsumed into its algal host organism, co-evolving with it for long enough that it can now be considered an organelle, part of the alga’s cellular machinery. That […]

The myth of elephant graveyards has pervaded popular culture, and recent observations of buried Asian elephant calves may finally give that legend some credence. In the research published in the Journal of Threatened Taxa, two scientists describe five instances where elephant calves have been found buried in a legs-upright position within irrigation trenches of tea […]