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The whole inner Solar System was blasted with intense plasma back in May. Most of it came from a single extremely active sunspot called AR3664. This was responsible for a coronal mass ejection leading to spectacular auroral displays at lower latitudes than usual, and a solar flare that caused a significant radio blackout on Earth […]

Orcas have become pretty much the poster child for ocean shenanigans in the last few years with their antics sinking yachts in the Mediterranean. While research suggests they are doing this mostly for fun, and not for malicious reasons, new research has been released that sees them gobbling up sharks in the Gulf of California, […]

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot – a storm larger than our whole planet – is one of the most visible features of the Solar System, thought to date to not long after the invention of the telescope, if not much earlier. However, new evidence suggests it instead originated in 1831 and has been mistaken for being […]

El Niño is officially over – and while we are currently in ENSO-neutral conditions, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center, La Niña is expected to return this summer, possibly as early as July. This new phase is forecast to persist through the Northern Hemisphere winter and ties in with […]

Earth is not an isolated system; our planet receives energy and particles from outer space. Some of those particles are what we refer to as cosmic rays, a source of radiation with celestial origin. In general, cosmic rays do not affect us humans. We have evolved under this shower of extraterrestrial particles. However, it does […]

A 21-year-old man has received a week-long jail sentence, a hefty fine, and a two-year ban from Yellowstone National Park after trespassing near the notoriously explosive Steamboat Geyser. Advertisement The incident took place on April 19 this year; Viktor Pyshniuk, of Washington, was spotted and then photographed by an on-duty park employee crossing over the […]

Human feet sailing in sneakers can offer a unique opportunity to ascertain the facts of a case based on marine forensics of scant remains. Just as metamorphizing insects on land can tell us the time of death of corpses, the larval stages of barnacles can help us work out how long human remains have been […]

The International Astronomical Union is now accepting names for one of our planet’s quasi-moons, the space rocks that follow Earth’s path around the Sun without being bound to us like the Moon is. Advertisement The object in question is called 164207 (2004 GU9). It is a potentially hazardous asteroid up to 360 meters (1,181 feet) […]

A new study has taken a look at the safety of autonomous vehicles (AVs), finding that while overall, they are better than humans in several routine areas of driving, they are currently not as good as human drivers in low-light situations or turning. Advertisement Before we can simply step into our cars and allow them […]

An almighty discovery has been made during an expedition in the Atacama Trench, an 8,000-meter-deep formation that stretches along the length of Peru and Chile. Here, Scientists on a research expedition onboard Schmidt Ocean Institute’s R/V Falkor (too) found Chile’s deepest and northernmost cold seeps at a depth of 2,836 meters (9,304 feet). Advertisement Cold […]

In 1637, the French philosopher and probable pothead René Descartes came up with an interesting thought: can a machine think? In 1950, the English mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing announced the answer to this 300-year-old poser: who cares? A much better question, he said, was something that would come to be known as the […]

The fossil vertebra of a polar sea monster has been discovered that dates back 246 million years. Known as a nothosaur, the marine reptile lived just as the dinosaurs were getting started, and the fossil is the oldest of its kind ever found in the Southern Hemisphere. The ancient fossil is a single vertebra that […]

2020, it’s fair to say, was an odd year. With a pandemic moving across the world and all the life changes that involved, it’s easy to forget smaller stories, like that weird few months when monoliths started popping up around the world like Starbucks, sometimes containing cryptic messages. Well, good news if you missed it, […]

Stonehenge is one of those iconic monuments that has captured the imaginations of people. Its alignment with the Sun at the solstices is as clear as day, although the function of the monument remains uncertain. But researchers will be spending the next several months looking at a different type of alignment – some stones might […]

Our technology and knowledge, just as much as our values and beliefs, have all been shaped by thousands of generations of people stretching back in an unbroken chain. But when did this process of accumulation begin? Or, to put it another way, when did our earliest ancestors start to build on the knowledge of others […]

Every day is a learning day on the Internet. Last week, people learned what “Google” actually means, and yesterday people learned there’s a single word for “the day after tomorrow“. Today, people are learning that just as “bye” is a contraction of “goodbye”, “goodbye” is a contraction too. In its original form, the word was […]

As tempting as it is to give our pets a lil’ smooch when we see them, it’s probably not a great idea if that pet happens to be a bearded dragon. That’s because there’s currently a multistate Salmonella outbreak in the US and it’s been linked back to the otherwise lovely lizards. Advertisement The outbreak […]

Astronomers have witnessed a supermassive black hole turning itself on. The object sits at the center of galaxy SDSS1335+0728, which had been unremarkable until December 2019. But then, the brightness of this object began to increase significantly, and researchers believe that they have witnessed the awakening of this giant. Advertisement Supermassive black holes can be […]

Pet cats could be an important carrier of infection in a human pandemic of avian flu, a review of 20 years of research data has found. The study, which has been released as a preprint whilst awaiting peer review, suggests that cat owners should remain vigilant for signs of illness in their pets, which could […]

NASA has built its first two-way end-to-end relay system to send messages to and from the International Space Station (ISS). It used the 1.2 gigabits per second capacity (that’s faster than your home internet) to send the astronauts currently aboard the station photos and videos of cats, dogs, and the occasional parrot. Advertisement Space communication […]