News

This week on Break It Down: the second oldest use of the color blue ever has been discovered in Europe dating back 13,000 years, “chemical fossils” suggest the oldest life on Earth may have been sponges 541 million years ago, skin cells have been turned into fertilizable egg cells thanks to some pretty nifty genetics […]

Perhaps comets are like buses, because this month, there are three that are easily observable at once. In what looks like part of the marketing campaign for Wicked, they are also all green. And yes, if you care to find them, look to the western sky (at least for another few days). The three comets […]

Move over, instant noodles. The dinner of the future might be a cell-cultured chicken cutlet, grown from scratch in a meat-making machine that sits on your kitchen counter. At least, that’s the dream of the Shojinmeat Project, an art collective-meet-science experiment based in Tokyo. The project is the brainchild of Yuki Hanyu, a scientist with […]

It is the season of the threes when it comes to the night sky. We have three observable comets, all green, in the night sky this October, and over the next few months we will see three supermoons. The first one is just a few days away: the next full Moon is October 7, and […]

In a massive win for organ transplantation research, scientists have demonstrated that they can successfully change the blood type of a donor kidney to type O before transplanting it into a brain-dead recipient. All signs pointed towards the new organ being “well tolerated” with no evidence of immediate rejection. Government figures suggest over 100,000 people […]

We’ve all been there – one too many slices of garlic bread and you’ve woken up with breath that smells like an Italian restaurant, and probably not in a good way. Humans have been known to have some pretty pungent odors waft out our mouths, but what about other animals?  The answer to the question […]

The Greenland shark is the poster child for animals with extreme longevity – and with good reason. As the longest-living vertebrates on Earth, they develop incredibly slowly in their frosty Arctic home, but when it comes to the longest-living animals on Earth, they’re not all that. The ocean quahog is a pretty unremarkable-looking clam, reaching […]

In 2007, Inuit whalers in Alaska made a surprising discovery. In the carcass of a whale, they found fragments of a weapon embedded in its flesh – but this wasn’t a modern piece of equipment. The harpoon was traced back to the 1900s, and after investigation, scientists estimated that the whale itself was around 115 […]

Bearded vultures have been revealed as the somewhat surprising curators of natural museums, after scientists investigating centuries-old, abandoned nests discovered that they were packed with a whole host of well-preserved historical remains. Once found throughout the mountains and cliffs of southern Spain, bearded vultures are now extinct in these areas, having begun to disappear between […]

Within just 75 years, the glaciers of California’s Sierra Nevada are likely to have melted away, exposing the rocky parts of the mountains for the first time since the Ice Age. When that happens, people alive today may witness something no human has ever seen before: Yosemite’s peaks stripped bare of ice. The rest of […]

The US has hit a regrettable new measles milestone, with over 1,500 cases reported in the country so far this year. This is the highest number since the disease was locally eliminated at the turn of the century. Although weekly cases are well down compared to the peak of the outbreak in March of this […]

Not an accolade anyone wants, but for the Xerces blue butterfly, its extinction is considered the first of any American insect species to have been directly caused by humans. Last seen in 1941, genetic testing proved that the Xerces blue butterfly was a distinct species, and its disappearance was the first human-led insect extinction. Back in […]

Comet 3I/ATLAS, the third known interstellar visitor to the Solar System, will get closest to one particular planet in the Solar System. Bad news: it is not Earth, so we can’t get the best view of this object. Still, of all the planets of the Solar System, it is passing near Mars, where humanity has […]

India is home to roughly three-quarters of the world’s tigers. After a few precarious years due to hunting, conflict, and habitat loss, its population doubled between 2006 and 2018 thanks to conservation efforts, even increasing its range by 30 percent. However, some of the smaller populations are facing a common problem, one that tends to […]

The latest COVID-19 subvariants to spread around the world are causing a rise in cases that’s been noted in a number of countries. Should you be worried? Stratus and Nimbus variants If you’re struggling to keep up with all the variant names at this point, we get it. As a reminder, we’re onto clouds now, […]

An international team of astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) have spotted a rogue planet breaking a new record; growing at a rate of 6 billion tonnes per second. Rogue planets – sometimes called free-floating planets – are interstellar, planetary-mass objects that are not gravitationally bound to a star or […]

We know how the universe began. An event we call the Big Bang started it all about 13.8 billion years ago. How the universe ends, though, is an open question. The path forward depends on the properties of two hypothetical components of the universe: dark matter and dark energy, and one recent study suggests that […]

A new study on interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS has found unusual and as-yet-unexplained metals in the object’s coma. 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 comet with its own […]

A recent paper has proposed a new idea for what is causing the observed accelerated expansion of the universe, and dark matter, suggesting both of them may a “cosmic illusion” caused by the changing constants of the universe.  By observing the universe from the cosmic microwave background to our nearest galaxies, we know that our […]

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 […]