News

Galaxies big and small are now peppered across the universe like the blueberries in a muffin. They are distributed in what we call the cosmic web, a much less appetizing construct. Galaxies can be quite isolated, or in small groups, or large clusters, but if you zoom out, all these groupings are connected by filaments. […]

A Norwegian mining company claims to have discovered a gargantuan deposit of phosphate rock that could power the world’s battery and solar needs for the next 50 years, potentially pushing back what was previously described as a “ticking time bomb”. Phosphate is an integral part of the global push for renewables, alongside being a key […]

The longstanding theory that Mars is emerging from an ice age has gained support from the Zhurong rover.  The rover has produced evidence of a changing wind regime at just the time the Martian glacial period is thought to have ended, leaving a recognizable signal in the dunes of Utopia Planitia. For more than 20 […]

Astronomers have offered some of the first direct proof demonstrating that Starlink satellites are interfering with deep space research, with their emissions drifting outside of their allocated bands. The evidence grows to an increasingly loud chorus from scientists condemning the thick field of communications satellites that the Musk-owned company relies on to provide global internet, […]

Cases of Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF) – known as one of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) nine “priority diseases” due to its severity – are threatening to arise across broader parts of Europe, with experts saying it’s ”highly likely” it will spread within the UK in the near future. CCHF is a tick-borne disease that’s […]

Clouds can reflect a lot of sunlight. Earth’s clouds reflect around 30 percent of sunlight back into space while Venus, completely covered in clouds, reflects 75 percent, making it the brightest object in our night sky. Now, astronomers have found an exoplanet that is even shinier. Exoplanet LTT9779b reflects 80 percent of the starlight it […]

Being a “young Earth creationist” can’t be easy, believing the Earth is 6-12,000 years old despite all evidence to the contrary. People are often digging up evidence of life going back before 10,000 BCE, or else digging through rock that dates back hundreds of millions of years before God supposedly had a busy week of […]

You may be interested (or possibly horrified) to discover you ingest and inhale thousands of tiny life forms on a daily basis. The air and surfaces around you are home to multitudes of bacteria, fungi, viruses, mites, algae and protozoa. Your skin isn’t much better, with a complex ecosystem of organisms called commensals which aren’t […]

Glitter: the product that is essential in many sparkly Christmas decorations, children’s artwork, horrendous pranks, and the bane of many hoovers. It is a substance that gets everywhere and is almost impossible to remove. However, the time of the glitter era may be coming to an end, as there is rumor that we are currently […]

When you hear news reports about volcanoes spewing lava and ash, you may worry about the people nearby. In fact, almost one in ten people around the world live within 100 kilometres of an active volcano. For those living close to volcanoes, farming on their fertile soils, or visiting their spectacular landscapes, it is crucial […]

Step right up, as we take you on a voyage of discovery into the weird and wonderful world of the primate clitoris. Penises are so last year – it’s about time we turned our attention to the female of the species. That’s an opinion shared by the scientists behind new research that set out to […]

When British geographer Thomas Griffith Taylor made his daring venture through East Antarctica in 1911, his expedition stumbled across a terrifying sight: the edge of a glacier appearing to ooze a stream of blood. After a century of speculation, the cause of the Blood Falls has been pinpointed.  Scientists in the US used powerful transmission […]

A large mass of granite that has been slowly releasing heat has been discovered buried underneath a crater on the Moon. This is not science fiction, it’s ancient volcanism. The Moon used to have lava fields and eruptions, but astronomers had never actually found a more traditional Earth-like volcano – until they looked at what […]

A number of memes have caught our predator eyes lately, and got us thinking about the predator-prey relationship of various puppets and toys. “The Furby’s eyes are on the front of the head,” one iconic but now deleted tweet explains, “which implies that it’s a predator.” Another makes a similar observation, but about the Cookie […]

New Zealand is currently home to three of the world’s penguin species, including the smallest living penguin: the little penguin. A recent discovery of two fossilized skulls has found a potentially even smaller penguin species that might have been the ancestor to those living today. Meet Eudyptula wilsonae. The new fossil specimens were found in […]

Both explosions and implosions create heat to some degree, and when things get really hot vaporization can occur, but only in the right circumstances. The phenomenon sees liquids transition to a gaseous state as enough energy is released to break the intermolecular forces keeping them together. Vaporization is a dramatic phase change that requires a […]

The ability to glow is a mesmerizing trait – but some things can only do so under certain circumstances, for example, having a black light shone on them. So what is a black light, and how do they work? How do black lights work?  Black lights emit ultraviolet (UV) light, which has a shorter wavelength […]

Dark matter is thought to make up 85 percent of all matter in the universe but so far we have no direct evidence it exists. There are plenty of good reasons to believe that there is indeed a substance that doesn’t interact with light only gravity, but until its properties are measured we need to […]