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In 1907, Duncan MacDougall of Haverhill, Massachusetts, decided to try and prove the existence of the soul. All he needed was some people willing to die under his supervision, and some dogs. The Scottish doctor, for reasons he didn’t take time to note down, believed that the soul had physical mass and thus it should be […]

Forget the wheel, the printing press, or the Internet – cake is quite possibly one of humanity’s greatest ever inventions. Case in point: it’s been around for thousands of years, so there must be something about it that we like. And by “thousands of years” we don’t just mean people have been making and eating […]

A cloudy haze of volcanic ash is looming over Mount St Helens in Washington State, evoking memories of its notorious 1980 explosion, the deadliest eruption in US history. But fear not, scientific authorities have said that a major upset is not likely and the volcano is calm – truth be told, you’d know if this […]

After the successful collection of material from asteroid Ryugu, Hayabusa2 flew back to Earth to drop it off. But the spacecraft’s journey is not ending there. It is now traveling to perform a high-speed flyby of asteroid Torifune next July, and in 2031 will rendezvous with asteroid 1998 KY26. When this target was selected, it […]

Would you do anything for love? It’s a claim that Meatloaf made quite passionately, but who among us can really say we’d walk 1,000 miles simply on the off chance of finding love? Even The Proclaimers could only last 500, but I can tell you of at least one individual: Slavc, the Eurasian wolf. In […]

Meet the Facetotectans, a group of tiny crustaceans that have been raising big questions among biologists. These are the larvae, the juvenile form of this organism. We know how this story goes: larvae metamorphose into adults, sometimes undergoing spectacular changes – tadpoles into frogs, caterpillars into butterflies. The only problem with Facetotectans is that we […]

If you have binoculars and dark skies, right now you might be able to catch two comets. Better still, one is brightening enough that it may be visible to the naked eye within a few weeks. The history of comet watching offers plenty of warnings, but there are also reasons for optimism. At the same […]

Twelve years ago, a volcanic eruption almost totally wiped out life on an island in the Pacific. Now, in the wake of the devastation, scientists are using genetic analysis to see how flora managed to bounce back on the scarred island.  The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe […]

An incredibly badass photo that’s emerged from the 2025 Ocean Photographer Of The Year competition shows a juvenile orca going above and beyond as it hunts a harbour seal despite being at an age where most orcas are still relying on milk. That this powerful image earned photographer Yifan Ling second place in the wildlife […]

Sky lovers assemble! There is a lot going on in the next few days – stuff for every interest, location, and ability. We have a very awkward partial solar eclipse (best for literal seals), the equinox bringing forth the fall in the Northern Hemisphere and spring in the Southern, and some planetary shenanigans. The rest […]

Deep snows prevent the release of carbon dioxide from boreal forests, but when the snows are shallower it can escape, making global heating almost impossible to stop. However, reindeer and their wild counterparts caribou greatly reduce this problem, provided they are allowed to graze freely, new research indicates. The most frightening scenarios for the global […]

The hadal zone isn’t named after Hades – the Greek god of the underworld – for nothing. Starting 6,000 meters (20,000 feet) beneath the waves, this murky deep-sea environment is one of the deadliest habitats on Earth, with pressure levels that would crush a human body in an instant. And yet, an abundance of animals […]

Finding a mate in any species can be a challenge. Whether you need to fight off rivals, throw down the song performance of a lifetime, or simply be at the right place at the right time, animal mating is undoubtedly complex. The situation is even difficult for common species like garden snails, as poor Ned […]

NASA has announced a new milestone in the hunt for planets around other star systems, known as “exoplanets”. Humanity has been looking at the stars for a long time, but the earliest detections of planets orbiting around them have come in the last century, with improvements to telescope technology. But when we first made a […]

It’s hard enough to know what Neanderthals looked like, let alone sounded like. However, there’s good reason to suspect our extinct hominin cousins were capable of complex language – and not just grunts and groans.  You may be one of the millions of people who have seen the viral clip from the BBC show Neanderthal: […]

Astronomers have a new explanation for the strange behavior of the double star system V Sagittae, which has puzzled them for more than a century. The discovery suggests that Earthlings could soon be treated to two separate shows, once when the system’s white dwarf undergoes a nova explosion, and then again when it becomes a […]

Scientists these days are generally obliged to abide by high ethical standards, requiring them to prevent harm and conduct experiments morally, for instance, seeking informed consent from experiment participants. But stricter guidelines and ethics boards are a relatively recent development, and were often built in response to ethically dubious and morally abhorrent experiments conducted in […]

Around 2 million years ago, prehistoric humans in East Africa turned the tables on the carnivores that had previously terrorized them, learning not only to fend off these predators but also steal their kills, thus replacing them at the very top of the food chain. Generally, the ancient species Homo habilis is credited with making […]

The composition of crystals in volcanic rocks changes with their ages in ways that correlate with the Solar System’s movements around the Milky Way, scientists have reported. If the relationship is a real one, the findings would help us understand both our planet and our galaxy better, and prove a link between the two. The […]

Astronomers have seen something they did not expect: an Einstein Cross with not just the standard four images, there was an extra one. This unprecedented present might allow astronomers to better understand dark matter, the hypothetical substance believed to permeate the cosmos, outweighing the regular matter that makes us by a factor of five. What […]