News

Motty is the only confirmed example of a hybrid between the African elephant (Loxodonta africana) and the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus). While the young calf unexpectedly died less than two weeks after his birth, he managed to secure the unusual position of Guinness World Records’ “world’s rarest elephant”. Motty was born on July 11, 1978, at […]

There’s an extremely slim chance you have ever seen a narwhal in an aquarium – and for good reason. In North America, there have been only two attempts to keep narwhals in captivity, both of which ended in calamity and tragedy. Narwhals are a truly unusual species of toothed whales that live in the icy […]

Every year, around 2.4 million people in the UK get food poisoning – mostly from viral or bacterial contamination. Most people recover within a few days without treatment, but not all are that lucky. As a microbiologist, I’m probably more acutely aware of the risk of food-borne infections than most. Here are some of the […]

The word nova comes from “nova stella”, Latin for “new star”, the name Tycho Brahe gave to the sudden appearance in 1572 of a light in the sky where none had been seen before.  For centuries thereafter every sudden appearance of a new star in the sky was called a nova. Since we have learned […]

It is not always easy to understand animal behavior, especially when it involves other species. For decades, researchers have observed orca (killer whales) attacking and even killing porpoises in the Pacific Northwest. But bafflingly, these expert hunters don’t eat their victims. So what’s going on here? Southern Resident orca are a genetically and culturally distinct […]

Contrary to popular portrayals in Hollywood movies, it seems the identities of the first cowboys of America were far more diverse than previously assumed. In fact, the evidence suggests the first examples of these Western icons were actually from Mexico and the Caribbean, and most of them were enslaved peoples.  Prior to 1492, so the […]

A narluga is a hybrid born as a result of inter-species nookie between a narwhal and a beluga whale. This unusual mash-up of species has never been documented alive, but scientists know they exist thanks to a skull found by Inuits in the Arctic and DNA evidence. Narwhals and belugas are the sole living members […]

Contrary to what archaeologists, historians, and conspiracy theorists may tell you, the pyramids were erected as a stiff monument to the prostitutes that once graced the banks of the Nile – at least, that’s the punchline to a smutty joke that Ancient Egyptians used to tell. Though not remembered for their sense of humor, the […]

New rooms have been discovered in an ancient Egyptian pyramid, confirming the suspicions of archaeologists who first excavated the magnificent site almost 200 years ago. The rooms were recently discovered at the Pyramid of Sahura, built around 4,400 years ago for the Egyptian pharaoh Sahure of the Fifth Dynasty. The structure has been undergoing a […]

With their broad snouts and widely spaced eyes, hammerhead sharks are one of the strangest animals in the ocean. We have some idea, evolutionarily speaking, why they look the way they do, but quite how their distinctive hammers form has always been a mystery. Now, for the first – and possibly last – time, researchers […]

Today we recognize that handwriting is unique to each person. From the way we form our letters to the amount of pressure we place on pen and paper, the details of our individual writing can be used to identify us. The same, it seems, is true for ancient runesmiths, which has allowed archaeologists to finally […]

Water and sediment in the Cliff Cave system, Missouri, are contaminated with microplastics, scientists studying student-collected samples have found.  Reports of microplastic contamination are depressingly common these days, even in the most remote places. What makes this finding exceptional, however, is that no one has been able to enter the system for three decades prior […]

NASA’s Perseverance rover has set a new speed record, leaving the previous Mars rovers eating its Martian dust. Since successfully landing on Mars in February 2021, the Perseverance Rover has achieved some notable firsts, including producing enough oxygen to keep a small dog alive for an impressive 10 hours on the Red Planet. According to […]

You’ve been on a few dates, it’s going well, and you’re happily ensconced in that first flush of love. You think this could really go somewhere. Maybe it’s time to take it to the next level… but how can you be sure? It’s a question we all ask ourselves at the beginning of a relationship, […]

New supercomputer simulations support the idea that catastrophic satellite destruction is behind the formation of the beautiful rings of Saturn. This new work envisions two moons similar to what smallish Saturnian moons, like Dione and Rhea, look like today. Those moons smashed into each other, releasing a cloud of ice and rocks. And that ice […]

An expedition near the town of Kardzhali in Bulgaria led to the discovery of a curious and complex cave. Named the Utroba (утроба) Cave, which is Bulgarian for “womb”, it’s marked with carvings and rocky niches, one of which looks remarkably similar to that of a human vulva – so was it born of natural […]

Oxford students were the most lethal and violent of all the contemporary social and professional groups in medieval Oxford, London, and York, new research suggests. A digital mapping project led by Cambridge’s Violence Research Centre has plotted crime scene locations from three of medieval England’s largest cities. The Medieval Murder Maps project draws on 14th-century […]

Carbon microcrystals with “unique morphological peculiarities” have been lurking in the dust left behind by a meteorite that exploded over southern Russia in February 2013. Measuring 18 meters (59 feet) across, the Chelyabinsk meteor blew apart high in the atmosphere, creating a dust plume that circumnavigated the entire planet within four days. After recovering some […]

In decades gone by, rumors swirled around the forests of Africa that spoke of a strange chimpanzee-gorilla hybrid, known as koolakamba. They’ve been the subject of a small handful of studies since the 19th century, but hard proof – or even sturdy evidence – of their existence has continued to allude scientists. One of the […]

Astronomers have used the observations by the Gaia satellite from the European Space Agency (ESA) to work out exactly how much mass the Milky Way has. And it turns out it is less than previous estimates, placing the total at 206 billion times the mass of our Sun. The Gaia data is the most detailed […]