News

There’s a flower that blooms in the forests of Indonesia that’s infamous for the smell it produces. It’s a rare event that it releases its stench, but when it does, a bouquet of “rotting fish, very smelly socks[…] like a food bin that’s overflowing” is released into the air – so says Glasshouse Horticulturist at […]

Dogs with blue fur have been spotted snooping in Chernobyl, the restricted area surrounding the epicenter of the infamous nuclear disaster. Rest assured, the dogs have not changed color due to any freakish mutation from decades of radiation – the explanation is likely to be far more mundane, if not a little bit gross. Speaking to […]

The international LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration reports the observations of two record-breaking events in gravitational wave observations. They were detected in October and November 2024, and they might be a crucial step forward in our understanding of the ripples in space-time and the events that create them. In the 10 years since the first detection of gravitational […]

It’s official: Hurricane Melissa is the strongest storm of 2025. After slowly moving its way to the Caribbean, it rapidly intensified in strength to a Category 5 yesterday morning, and is soon to make landfall in Jamaica, where it’s likely to cause significant damage. Key takeaways Hurricane Melissa has reached Category 5 status, and is […]

For the first time, an ultrasound probe with the capability of imaging complete organs in four dimensions has been developed by a team of scientists in France.  For as long as we’ve had bodies, humans have wanted to look inside them. This desire to understand our inner workings and fix them when they go wrong […]

In a twist of fate that couldn’t be more perfect for the Halloween season, researchers have discovered that six species of North American bats glow green under UV light.  Last year, scientists discovered that the Mexican free-tailed bats’ toes twinkled a greenish-blue under UV light and it may be used as their own bat signal […]

Human intelligence has often been held apart from that of non-human animals, but as time goes by we are increasingly discovering that we’re not all so different. A pivotal moment in our understanding of animal intelligence came in 1976 when something remarkable broke out of an egg. The young bird wasn’t considered remarkable at the […]

What’s below the ice of Antarctica? Drill down into the Earth’s biggest desert to find out, and you’ll probably come away with the answer “more ice” – and that’s not wrong, exactly, but it’s certainly not the whole story. “The surface of Antarctica is pretty harsh. We see very little to no life at the […]

Modern cars are, that one brand notwithstanding, safer than ever before.  The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. Don’t believe us? The numbers don’t lie: 100 years ago, there were around 18 motor vehicle-related deaths per 100 million miles driven; in the mid-1960s, […]

Spotted a pretty feather on the ground? It might be tempting to pick it up and pop it in your pocket, but that’s not as innocent an idea as it seems – you’d be committing a crime. The reason why takes us all the way back to the late 1800s, in the Gilded Age. In […]

They say “technology marches on,” but if we’re honest, that march has evolved into more of a sprint. Whatever you buy it’ll be mere minutes before a more up-to-date, faster, and higher-definition version is available, but is it worth it? After all, if you’re still using your humble human body to take it all in, […]

Comet 3I/ATLAS is the third known interstellar object to cross the Solar System, and in a matter of days it will pass the central point in its foray around our corner of the universe. On October 29, the comet will reach 203 million kilometers (126 million miles) from the Sun. That is about 36 percent […]

The great migrations of animals across the African savannah or birds between hemispheres are dwarfed by the movement of humans, a new study has calculated. That’s a consequence of humans and domesticated animals dominating biomass on land. Despite winter flights from colder climates to the Mediterranean or Caribbean, humans do not present as impressive a […]

Researchers have observed rats taking bats from the air for the first time. These adventurous hunters were recorded showing this behavior on a ledge outside a cave not far from Hamburg, snatching up their bat snacks at night. While an impressive skill, given that they are virtually blind in the darkness, the invasive rats could […]

Sci-fi movies and TV shows love to place a planet inside a binary system. In reality, a planet shouldn’t be able go around two stars that orbit each other closely. That configuration should just be too unstable. Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell the universe that it should not happen, because we keep finding them. Now, […]

A group of spiky reptiles living on Clarion Island off the coast of Mexico has escaped extermination after it was discovered that they are not the invaders they had been labeled. Known as spiny-tailed iguanas (Ctenosaura sp.), it had been assumed they were introduced to the island by humans, but oh how wrong we were. […]

It is a good rule of thumb to try to see meteors with the naked eye. They move too quickly and they are too ephemeral to catch them with a telescope. Still, all good rules have exceptions, and this latest exception created a stunning mirage around Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon), as a red helix seems […]

Men, on average, are about 13 centimeters (5 inches) taller than women, with sex hormones and growth genes thought to be the main drivers of this height difference. However, while numerous studies have sought to identify these male-specific genes, the long and short of it is that we still don’t really understand the genetic mechanisms […]

Scientists could be on course to develop the first treatment with a chance of controlling and even reversing liver fibrosis, thanks to a discovery from a rather surprising source. Pigments extracted from the henna tree Lawsonia inermis, used for generations for coloring hair and decorating skin, have proven to be a promising drug candidate in […]

A popular mushroom species can be trained to remember past electrical states, allowing it to act as both a memory device and data processor known as an organic memristor. Scaling performance may be a challenge, but theoretically, the discovery opens the way to computers that consume fewer resources and might eventually be cheaper and certainly […]