News

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 […]

Global health is in a dramatic state of flux. As the world becomes ever-more globalized, we’re becoming buried by a tsunami of preventable diseases: obesity, cardiovascular disease, countless cancers, and allergies, to name but a few. While we might imagine that humans are the main character behind this change, the real star of the show […]

In the competitive and weird world of spider mite mating, there’s no time to waste as evidenced by the discovery that males will crack open the juvenile skin suits of developing females to speed things along. Not content to wait for the females to shed dead skin themselves, the males have evolved to spot the […]

Under normal circumstances, seeing a sea lion on the beaches of California would be a pleasant experience. These animals are social and gregarious and are the most abundant species of pinnipeds on this coast. However, beach goers are now being warned to keep an eye out for unusual behavior among these marine mammals as a […]

If you burrow deep enough, what lies beneath the polar ice sheets? Would you find mud, rock, water, more ice, an ancient mosiac, or just synthetic laminate flooring? Well, it depends on whether you’re hoping to delve under the North Pole or the South.  The Arctic in the Northern Hemisphere is simply an ice sheet […]

Seismic waves passing through the Earth’s solid inner core reveal it is textured, rather than homogenous. Little is known about the nature of these variations at this stage – simply discovering they exist is quite an achievement when you’re dealing with something shielded from our eyes by thousands of kilometers of rock. Most of the […]

Humanity’s relationship with telling time began before the first written word, making it a challenge today to investigate the origin of many timekeeping units. However, some time measurement units that derive from astronomical phenomena are quite easy to explain and likely were independently observed in many different cultures across the world. For example, measuring how […]

In 1815, the volcano Mount Tambora in Indonesia exploded in what was probably the largest eruption of the last 1,500 years. The event caused millions of tons of ash, dust, and sulfur dioxide to be released into the atmosphere, casting a temporary chill across the planet as it blocked out the sunlight for months on […]

Archaeologists have discovered 25 large pits dotted around the English countryside in what has become a nationally important prehistoric find.  The pits were discovered in Linmere, Bedfordshire, during two digs that took place in 2019 and 2021, respectively. According to radiocarbon dating, these odd features were created between 8,500 and 7,700 years ago – squarely […]