News

An airline worker died after being ingested into the engine of an airplane at San Antonio International Airport in Texas on Friday. The plane was an Airbus A319 operated by Delta Air Lines that was arriving in San Antonio from Los Angeles, according to a statement from the National Transportation Safety Board shared with NPR. […]

Orangutans could make great beatboxers if they had the inclination, as new research has discovered they can make two sounds simultaneously. The skill is seen in birds and human beatboxers and could explain how Homo sapiens evolved to be able to boots n’ cats so damn well (which, by the way, looks really weird in an MRI). […]

The molecule methenium, also known as methyl cation (CH3+) has been observed in interstellar space for the first time. The detection comes from the Orion nebula, the closest region of massive star formation to Earth, and in particular from a protoplanetary disk known as d203-506. Among the many young stars forming in this vast nebula, […]

Lightning is no doubt one of nature’s most impressive creations, from the 11-hour lightning marathon after the Tonga eruptions to bright green lightning bolts captured on Jupiter. Down on Earth is no exception with this spectacular composite image taken in the Turkish sky. Amateur astronomer Uğur İkizler made this incredible image by combining images of the different […]

Monitoring HIV status could become easier than ever before, thanks to an innovative new device developed by a team at Johns Hopkins University. The device is powered by a smartphone and uses CRISPR technology to produce a result in just 15 minutes, giving patients a rapid and accurate measurement of their viral load. “We want […]

Inventors, bless them, are constantly coming out with new inventions. If this story is anything to go on, they’d be far better off putting their fancy new flying cars on hold and simply forcing everyone to learn how to use the inventions they already have. A video of a toaster has been widely shared on […]

Over the past week, people have been debating whether they would stay in the catacombs of Paris for a cool $10 million. The debate is entirely hypothetical, started by the account “creepy.org” on Twitter. $10 million is a lot of money, so why aren’t people keen? Well, as well as concerns about respect for the […]

A new study has shown that wolves, just like dogs, recognize and respond to human voices, especially those they are familiar with. This has interesting implications for our understanding of both canine domestication and how species interact.  Many animals can discriminate between members of their species (conspecifics) and recognize familiar individuals by sight, smell, or […]

The rumors are true: lemon juice, soda, and other beverages can be misused to provide false-positive results on certain tests, such as lateral flow tests.  This piece of knowledge grew during the COVID-19 pandemic when schoolkids in the UK were reportedly using this trick to forge at-home tests to get out of class. However, there […]

The one fundamental law of the universe remains true – if something happens, MythBusters or The Simpsons foresaw it. With the recent catastrophic implosion of the Titan submersible while hunting the Titanic, a MythBusters clip of them testing out what implosion actually looks like has resurfaced and it’s pretty dramatic.  The MythBusters team looked to […]

In China’s northwestern Gansu Province, the city of Dunhuang’s desert hills are alive with the sound of music. A fascinating, and somewhat eery, phenomenon causes the staggeringly high sand dunes scattered throughout the Kumtag Desert to “sing” in the wind. The Singing Sand Dunes range in size, with the highest peak reaching 1,715 meters (5,626 […]

A new technique has been used to estimate the age of globular star cluster M92 at 13.8 billion years, plus or minus 0.75 billion years. This is an almost exact match for the estimated age of the Universe, albeit with wider error bars. Either this nearby collection of stars formed as soon as possible after […]

Iceland’s government has suspended this season’s commercial whaling due to animal welfare concerns. While the suspension only lasts until the end of this summer 2023, animal rights groups are hoping it will be the final nail in the coffin for the dwindling whaling industry in Iceland. The move was announced on June 20 by Svandís […]

A study has taken a look at whether regular porn users experience withdrawal symptoms after seven days of abstaining (or attempting to abstain) from pornography. After the rise of the Internet, there has been a significant increase in pornography consumption, with PornHub – one of the most popular adult websites – reporting over 39 billion […]

The JWST devoted more than two and a half hours of its precious time to observing Saturn this weekend, and the images above and below are among the products. The different images show the planet, its rings, and sometimes its moons as seen using different filters, in some cases really letting the rings steal the […]

Just three minutes of physical stress appears to increase males’ responses to sexual stimuli, according to one study. When shown sexual images, males that had done a short bout of exerting strong hand grip just prior had a stronger bodily response compared to the control group, suggesting physical exertion could boost mechanisms controlling arousal.  The […]

Three of the most cataclysmic nuclear events of the 20th century took place in three cities, two in Japan and one in Ukraine. We are probably all familiar with what happened in each case, but what isn’t so clear is why people have been able to live and thrive in Hiroshima and Nagasaki but not […]

Mount Vesuvius is the infamous volcanic force that looms over the Gulf of Naples. However, it’s less known that this idyllic pocket of the Italian coast is also home to another peril: Campi Flegrei.  Given its potential to rain hell on a major Mediterranean city, it’s been speculated that this active volcano could create the […]