News

A rare, unusually-colored bottlenose dolphin has caught the eye of Australian researchers. Its unique skin pattern has been attributed to piebaldism, earning the marine mammal the nickname “Speckles”. Researchers say that Speckles is the first piebald dolphin ever seen in Australian waters. Speckles was spotted near a research vessel in Hervey Bay, Queensland, on the […]

NASA’s Perseverance rover has captured an image of the Ingenuity helicopter’s final resting place, after it stopped functioning late last month. Ingenuity was an impressive little robot, becoming the first to make a powered, controlled flight on a planet other than Earth in April 2021. That’s no easy feat, given the wildly different conditions on […]

A legal battle over the safety of adding fluoride to drinking water in the US is currently in full swing, with plaintiffs arguing that the chemical poses a threat to the neurodevelopment of children. Judge Edward Chen of the US District Court for the Northern District of California has been hearing expert testimony since January […]

New species are discovered all the time – and while some fit nicely into previously created taxonomic families, others are so funky that they get a whole new naming system created just for them. Introducing the St George’s Cross Medusa (Santjordia pagesi) a brand new medusa jellyfish species from deep waters off the coast of […]

China is the undisputed world champion of dam building. Not only do they have more working large dams than every other country in the world, but they also hold the record for the largest capacity hydroelectric power station in operation: the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. Now, the East Asian superpower is in […]

Sit with your own thoughts for long enough and you’ll come up with all sorts of questions. If you banged a tuning fork in space, would it vibrate forever? Is Jurassic Park possible? Does musical genre affect the flavor of cheese? And on today’s roster: why doesn’t the water in lakes just absorb into the […]

Meet the Irish elk: an enormous extinct deer with a pair of comically large antlers to boot. The ancient behemoth’s unusual appendages, which measure a whopping 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) from tip to tip, may look impressive but we’re not exactly sure why they’re quite so big. According to one new study, their size doesn’t […]

Prior to achieving their final form, gas planets take on flattened shapes technically known as oblate spheroids, a new study has found. Although the Earth today is still classified as an oblate spheroid, thanks to slight flattening at the poles, the protoplanet stage is drastically flatter, according to newly published modelling, looking more like an […]

Some people are just learning where in the kitchen you are supposed to store bananas. In a TikTok video, user @tipperk stored bananas in four different ways, apparently used by people in real life. These included wrapping a wet paper towel around the stem (or handle, according to the “monkey method”), putting plastic wrap around […]

Dwarf galaxies tend to be found around larger galaxies, having formed around them. There is a small population of dwarf galaxies that is isolated and they are known for their vigorous star formation. Astronomers didn’t think that dwarf galaxies that were both isolated and had little star formation existed. Somebody must have forgotten to tell […]

The organizers of the Vesuvius Challenge, which started in 2023, have now announced their grand prize winners who have successfully revealed ancient secrets hidden on petrified scrolls. The announcement not only marks the outcome of ingenious work but may also indicate an exciting new era of research. The Vesuvius Challenge was launched in March 2023 […]

The Yakut region in Northern Siberia is one of the coldest places on Earth, and yet some hardy horses can survive, even thrive, there. With their thick winter coats, squat bodies, and stubby limbs, native Yakutian horses are adorably well adapted to their frosty climes – but they also have another handy trick up their […]

One of the most remote fossil sites in all of Australia has just delivered a whopper of a new species: a predatory lobe-finned fish that was armed with large fangs and bony scales. It lived 380 million years ago at a time when the mid-Devonian had plunged the planet into a period of decreased atmospheric […]

After diving into the genomes of North Atlantic blue whales, scientists have found that the population is infused with a significant amount of hybrid DNA due to interbreeding with fin whales. Furthermore, it appears that blue whales are interbreeding with the blue-fin hybrids, adding a further twist to this genetic cocktail. In the new study, […]

The last total solar eclipse over the US was pretty spectacular, as anyone who saw it will attest. Looking at the photos, it’s hard to imagine how the sight could have been improved upon in the eclipse taking place on April 8 this year. But if we are lucky and the weather is fine, we […]

Nutrition is always a hot topic, with people holding very strong opinions about the best diet plan to ensure long-term health. However, science is far from settled on how different diets can impact the immune system. To find out more, researchers from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) took two of today’s most popular […]

Valentine’s Day is fast approaching and in amongst the romantic gestures, fancy meals, and discount chocolate boxes, it’s easy to forget that not all relationships are perfect – some people will cheat. But are there particular traits that make them do so? Are they simply walking red flags, or are there more subtle indicators that […]

NASA’s Juno conducted its 58th close encounter with Jupiter (perijove) at the weekend and its final close flyby of Io, the innermost of Jupiter’s four Galilean moons. Io is known for the volcanic activity that marks its surface, the first active volcanoes discovered beyond Earth. The latest photos have caught some of those volcanoes erupting. […]

Our galaxy has a weak – but immense – magnetic field that stretches across most of it. Although we know its broadest outline, the fine-scale detail is a mystery. Now, the magnetism or a small portion of has been revealed at finer resolution, revealing there is a lot more jumble to it than smooth models […]

Twenty years after its discovery, asteroid and quasi-moon 2002 VE 68 has been officially renamed “Zoozve” after a strange label on his 2-year-old child’s poster of the Solar System led Radiolab host Latif Nasser to investigate further. In a widely-shared X (Twitter) thread, Nasser explained that he found a mystery moon on his child’s astronomy […]