News

From the largest planets to comets, there are a variety of worlds in the Solar System that experience aurorae. On Earth, the Northern and Southern Lights are caused by electrically charged particles from the solar wind. They get carried along our planet’s magnetic field to higher latitudes before slamming into the atmosphere. That collision makes […]

A new paper has set out ways that we can test the anthropic principle, or whether the universe has been “finely tuned” for life. Surprisingly, it may be possible to have answers to this age-old question in a pretty short timescale. There is a problem (or not, for fans of being alive) within physics, in […]

China’s got a problem. The southern regions of the country are relatively humid and well-watered, yet much of the north suffers from parchingly arid conditions. This issue has become increasingly burdensome as a third of the nation’s vast population is concentrated in the dry northern basins. A bold solution is being delivered in the form […]

The universe is undergoing an accelerated expansion. The so-called Hubble constant indicates the rate of that expansion, and there are a few ways for astronomers to measure it. But there is a major problem. The main methods profoundly disagree with each other. This is the saga of the Hubble tension, challenging everything we know (and […]

If you’ve watched enough cartoons, you have probably noticed something odd about the characters within them. An awful lot of them have only three fingers and a thumb, and a lot of them are wearing gloves. The Simpsons have three fingers and a thumb, Mickey Mouse has the same, and Spongebob Squarepants too; you name […]

The Amazon River snakes around for at least 6,400 kilometers (3,977 miles), yet it is not crossed by a single bridge (at least officially). Given humankind’s strong tendency to reshape natural landscapes and traverse the seemingly impossible, this anomaly begs the question – why? One of the main reasons is that there isn’t much demand […]

We all know that the ocean holds many mysterious creatures, from incredible whales to sponges that can live for 11,000 years. One such species deserves some more recognition: it’s time to meet the bowmouth guitarfish. What Is A Bowmouth Guitarfish? Bowmouth guitarfish (Rhina ancylostoma) have a striking unusual appearance: though they appear to have the […]

Having lived alongside humans since the Ice Age, dogs have unsurprisingly picked up a few of our tricks, with a knack for communication being among their top talents. According to new research, these conversational skills may be significantly more advanced than we previously thought, as some dogs appear able to combine multiple words in order […]

In case you have missed it, Google announced some pretty impressive achievements in the field of quantum computing on Monday. Tucked away in the announcement by the lead of Google Quantum AI was a suggestion that its quantum computer may have achieved these feats with the help of calculations performed in a different universe. According […]

Traditional chemistry is so last year. Welcome to the world of mechanochemistry, where reactions that were thought impossible – indeed, that are impossible when attempted in more conventional ways – become possible, and where brand-new avenues of exploration are opening up.  Even if the last time you entered a chemistry lab was way back in high […]

Earth’s rocky crust can sometimes seem like a drab, dull, and lifeless place (sorry, geologists, we know it’s more interesting than that… sometimes). However, with a drill, a microscope, and a bit of luck you’ll see that beneath the surface lies a hidden world of history and life.  The term “endolith” – deriving from the […]

A curious phenomenon has been reported among people who have undergone heart transplants. For some, they believe that they may have received more than just an organ in the exchange, as they report altered emotions, tastes, and even memories that seem to belong to the person who donated it. Could it be that these organs […]

The land bridge across the Bering Strait that lasted through much of the last Ice Age was likely very different from what has been imagined. Instead of a mix of grassland, tundra, and ice sheet, the connection between Asia and North America consisted of boggy wetlands punctuated by rivers and higher ground, a new study […]

When you bake a loaf of bread or a batch of muffins, you put the dough into a pan. As the dough bakes in the oven, it expands into the baking pan. Any chocolate chips or blueberries in the muffin batter become farther away from each other as the muffin batter expands. The expansion of […]

There are a lot of things that people are good at guessing just by taking a look, like whether something is sturdy enough, or well-balanced. But it seems that knots are something that eludes most of us. Once a good sturdy knot is placed among similar but worse ones, our brains can’t immediately recognize the […]

In a world that still contains some potent predators, you might think the deadliest animal would be something like a great white shark, or a grizzly bear, or another similar beastie. You would certainly be forgiven for thinking so, given how much media attention a rare big animal attack gets these days. However, the world’s […]

Nature has a nifty way of throwing unexpected collaborations into the mix, and on that topic, might we introduce you to the panda dolphin. Known to science as the Commerson’s dolphin, it rocks an unusual pattern in black and white and has a curious habit of swimming upside-down. Panda dolphins are divided into two subspecies, […]

In the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, collisions occur where, for a fraction of a second, the conditions that existed right after the Big Bang happen once more. In the deluge of particles that form during those moments, physicists are keen to find the most peculiar, as they help probe the limits of our physics. […]

Many of us remember growing up with questionable toys that would not make it onto the shelves today – whether they would not be deemed appropriate for kids today or contained potentially harmful materials that made them a health risk. Now, a vintage toy set that was once listed as one of the “most dangerous […]

So-called dark comets exist in two classes, large objects in the outer Solar System and smaller ones closer to the Sun, a new paper reveals. Dark comets are not a form of dark matter, but objects with no visible tail or outgassing, but whose orbits reveal comet-style acceleration. It’s a category that includes ‘Oumuamua, the […]