News

After decades of dreaming, Italy has once again set its sights on building the longest suspension bridge in the world to connect the Italian mainland with the island of Sicily. Their vision is a bridge that stretches around 3,300 meters (10,800 feet) over the Strait of Messina, the thin strip of sea between the “toe” […]

Being elusive might seem exclusively the realm of spies and space stuff, but animals are pretty good at it too, and one that takes the trait to heart is the Somali sharp-snouted worm lizard. Having not been officially seen in over 90 years, the odd-looking creature has now made a reappearance. The Somali sharp-snouted worm […]

Humans have affected pretty much every part of the planet with our various pollutants, no matter how hard they are to reach.  For example, in 2020 a new species found in the Mariana Trench was eventually named after the plastic found in its guts, and in 2023 microplastics were discovered in a cave system that […]

The climate crisis and the warming of the planet is having a devastating effect on the natural world and the animal species that live in it. While polar bears have been found to be at greater risk of starvation due to a lack of sea ice, another species is facing the opposite problem, being put […]

Deep beneath the surface of the Earth, there is a massive reservoir of water. It is estimated to contain three times the amount of water of all the oceans on our surface. In 2014, a team from the US used 2,000 seismometers to study seismic waves from over 500 earthquakes. By examining the speed of the […]

When OSIRIS-REx was planned, the mission team aimed to collect at least 60 grams of material. That was the requirement for a successful mission. Well, consider OSIRIS-REx doubly successful, as it brought back home 121.6 grams (4.29 ounces), the largest collection of extraterrestrial material from beyond the Moon. The return of the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition […]

This week a lone stingray in a North Carolina aquarium was found to be pregnant and the idea of the world’s first shark-ray hybrid was put forward, a 280-million-year-old fossil was identified as a partial forgery, and Earth has received a power beam sent from space for the first time. Finally, we take a closer […]

There is an ancient cave in Somerset, England, that may hold a complicated secret related to our prehistoric past: evidence of human cannibalism. Gough’s Cave, which was formed around 500,000 years ago, is located in Cheddar Gorge, which is made of limestone (not cheese) and is located in the Mendip Hills near Bristol. The cave […]

A magnificent fossil find was made in the Italian Alps in 1931. The specimen retrieved was thought to show remarkable preservation of an ancient reptile’s soft tissues, but that wasn’t the whole story. Now, a new study has revealed what makes this unusually well-preserved fossil so unusual: that “soft tissue” is, in fact, just black […]

A team of physicists at MIT have captured the phenomenon of “second sound” in direct images for the first time. In usual materials, heat prefers to spread out from a localized source until it dissipates into its surroundings. But in certain materials, this is not the case. This includes superfluids, a state of matter caused […]

There are three types of magnetism, not two, new research reveals, and the new one could be much in demand. To the first users of compasses, magnets must have seemed a form of magic. Just when we started to think we had got a grasp on the traditional form, known as ferromagnetism, a new one, […]

Ancient paintings on the walls of a Patagonian cave have been dated to 8,200 years ago, making them the oldest known rock art in the region by several millennia. Staggeringly, researchers also found that the markings were built up over a period of roughly 3,000 years, suggesting that the illustrations were used to transmit cultural […]

A new study looking at impact cratering on Titan has found bad news in the search for life on the moon, and potentially other icy moons of the Solar System as well. Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is often thought of as a potential candidate for life. The moon is the only place in the Solar […]

The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in Japan is currently the world’s largest nuclear power plant. As mighty as it may be, its reactors have been shut off for several years due to a cacophony of disasters and controversies. Recent developments suggest that may soon change, however. The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant is located at a 404-hectare (1,000-acre) […]

Contrary to past assumptions, passing stars can cause changes in the orbits of planets, including the Earth, that are large enough to affect the climate, research suggests. By not taking this into account we’ve overestimated our capacity to calculate past orbital variations, and therefore our capacity to attribute past climate changes to variations in Earth’s […]

The world’s biggest iceberg – the A23a megaburg – has recently been spotted performing a full 360° spin as it floats off the coast of Antarctica.  A23a made headlines in November last year when the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) announced it was on the move for the first time in over three decades. The iceberg […]

Getting out more energy from nuclear fusion is a fundamental step in making it the energy source of the future. So far, it has been achieved only in one system – the inertial fusion approach of the National Ignition Facility (NIF). New research on a similar approach shows that the NIF might have competition in […]

Looking at objects far away in the universe is like looking back in time, a very useful consequence of the finiteness of the speed of light. Very distant objects are therefore very young objects, as they were when the universe was also young. Imagine the surprise, then, of astronomers who found a very distant galaxy […]

The Silk Road, the mega highway that linked the far-flung corners of Eurasia, wasn’t the only grand trade route of the ancient world. In Europe, another historical trade network spanned from the North Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, quenching the wild demand for “the gold of the north” – amber.  It’s impossible to say when […]

The animal kingdom has a multitude of tricks for surviving harsh weather conditions and long, cold winters. From snuggling down in a cave to sleep away the worst of the weather, to shutting down all but the most basic of functions as a way to save energy, we break down the differences between the ways […]