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Animal life is a recent addition to Earth, relatively speaking. The planet formed about 4.5 billion years ago, with microbial life likely emerging between 4.3 and 3.7 billion years ago. It was not until several billion years later that animals started to rock up in a humble and vaguely familiar form: sponges. In a new […]

Women, generally speaking, live longer than men. That’s true of humans across nearly all countries and historical time periods – and the male-female gap is even observed in other species. But why? A new study may shed some light on this long-standing mystery, hinting that it is deeply rooted in evolutionary history. An international team, […]

Dame Jane Goodall has died at the age of 91, her institute announced on October 1. Tributes have poured in as people mourn the loss of one of the most important scientists and conservationists of the 20th century.  British-born Dr Jane Goodall began studying chimpanzees in Gombe, Tanzania, in 1960. What followed was a 65-year […]

Did her plane crash into the sea? Was she captured by Japanese soldiers? Was she eaten by giant crabs? Nearly 90 years after her disappearance, new details about the pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart could soon come to light.  The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the […]

It was exactly two decades ago that the Cassini mission discovered that underneath the surface of Enceladus, one of the icy moons of Saturn, there is a deep ocean. Thanks to the mission, we have learned that the moon is releasing geysers into space, forming another ring of Saturn: the E Ring. In those geysers, […]

In a study taking data from across the USA, children and adolescents were found to have double the risk of developing long COVID after their second infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19. This goes against what many people assumed to be true – that your second run-in with the virus is generally less severe […]

Long before its days in the Bible, the Red Sea had a strange and turbulent history. Millions of years ago, this narrow strip of water between Africa and Asia totally dried out and turned the seabed into a salty plain. It then suddenly refilled due to a catastrophic megaflood. The rest of this article is […]

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)-Virgo collaboration may have detected evidence of another universe, according to a new pre-print paper looking at unusual gravitational wave event GW190521. Gravitational wave detectors are awesome even without the potential for spotting wormholes. When LIGO was built, it was aimed at detecting gravitational waves (GWs) – ripples in spacetime, […]

A team of physicists say they have found a way to sidestep Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, one of the more troublesome and irritating rules of our universe. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, for the uninitiated, states that it is not possible to exactly measure or calculate both the position and momentum of an object at the same time.  […]

It’s a breakthrough that sounds straight out of sci-fi. A team at Stanford University announced in a recent preprint that they’ve used AI to generate a virus genome, and from that produced functional virus particles. The viruses in question are bacteriophages, which only infect bacteria – they can’t infect humans, or any other animals for […]

Some creatures are only known from very few specimens, like the pocket sharks, which were discovered once in 1979, from one specimen, then were not seen again until a slightly different species turned up in 2015. To date, these remain the only known pocket shark specimens to have ever been found.  The rest of this […]

Later this month, on October 21 to be precise, comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) will make a close approach to the Earth. At a predicted magnitude of 3.9, the dramatically brightening comet should be visible to the naked eye as it rushes past. There will be other opportunities to view space objects this year, including C/2025 […]

In the remote soils of Easter Island, beneath its towering stone statues, scientists stumbled upon a bacterium that would change medicine forever and sparked the creation of a multi-million-dollar drug. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. Rapamycin, also known clinically as sirolimus, […]

A team of astronomers have presented the first polarimetric observations of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, finding that it has extreme negative polarization. On July 1, 2025, astronomers spotted an object moving through the Solar System at nearly twice the velocity of previous interstellar visitors ‘Oumuamua and Comet Borisov. The object was confirmed to be an interstellar […]

Countless humans have eaten mammoth, although most were hungry hunter-gatherers struggling to survive during the Ice Age. Since the last mammoths fell into extinction 4,000 years ago, very few people in the modern age have tasted their meat – or so you would assume.  One story from the turn of the 20th century involves Otto […]

The liver is one of the human body’s most impressive organs, able to regenerate itself even after it’s damaged or a bit of it is lopped off – but its abilities can only be pushed so far. Long term, excessive alcohol use can stop it from being able to heal itself even after someone stops […]

You might think that only werewolves howl at the Moon, but this spooky season, we’re bringing you another creature with a lot to say at nighttime. Meet the grasshopper mouse; it might be small, but it has one heck of a voice. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or […]

A short journey for a much-loved, reportedly 400-year-old oak tree dubbed “Jolene” is soon to take place in the Texan city of Kyle as part of a road expansion project, with the move set to cost nearly $1 million. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access […]

Deep in a mine in South Dakota is the LUX-ZEPLIN dark matter detector, a pair of nested titanium tanks filled with 10 tons of transparent, pure liquid xenon nestled far underground to shield it from cosmic particles that may drown out any faint signals. If dark matter is made of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) […]

The history of the Loch Ness Monster – a giant creature that inhabits a loch in Scotland – goes back a century, or many centuries, depending on who you ask.  The monster, the myth, the legend The earliest sighting connected to Nessie by some goes back all the way to 565 CE, with a strange […]