News

High above the Peruvian Amazon, the forests beam with gold. While the glittering pits might look pretty from low-Earth orbit, the image actually highlights a worrying problem back home on planet Earth. An astronaut on board the International Space Station (ISS) took this photograph of gold prospecting pits while drifting above eastern Peru on Christmas […]

In 2012, a group of archaeologists were digging at a site in Italy in the hopes of rediscovering a lost Etruscan tomb, known as the Tomb of the Sun and Moon, that had once been a popular tourist destination in the 18th and 19th century. Unfortunately, they were not successful, but their failure led to […]

A 200,000 light-year-long trail of bright stars has been found stretching between a distant galaxy and a curious formation. After close examination astronomers have concluded what we are seeing is a hyper-fast black hole plowing through intergalactic space. The black hole’s passage is compressing the diffuse gas that exists even between galaxies enough to start […]

Incredible new footage from the depths of the Atlantic shows an extremely rare sighting of a bigfin squid, a scarcely seen cephalopod known for its alien-like appearance and freakishly long tentacles.  The video (below) was captured by Schmidt Ocean’s remotely operated sub that was snooping around the “Lost City hydrothermal vent field” found along the […]

Cassiopeia A is a supernova remnant. From our point of view, 340 years ago, a massive star collapsed in on itself and turned into a supernova, flinging material out into the cosmos. This material has expanded greatly in the last three centuries and a half, the expansion shell moving at thousands of kilometers per second […]

Crab libidos can be curbed by shipping traffic, according to preliminary research that deployed crustacean sex dolls to see if noise pollution threw male green shore crabs off their game. The dolls were pheromone-soaked sponges that were convincing enough to get the crabs on board, but exposure to ship noise proved to be enough to […]

Priam’s Treasure may be some of the most famed and controversial archeological relics ever recovered. The cache of gold and other stunning artifacts was discovered in the 19th century by German businessman and amateur archeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who professed they belonged to the ancient king of Troy from Homer’s epic poem Illiad. His claim, however, […]

Time crystals are one of the most exciting metamaterials that have been discovered in the last decade. Just as a regular crystal has properties that repeat in space, time crystals have properties that vary in time. These peculiar objects are being studied with multiple applications in mind, and one of them has to do with […]

The volcanic eruption that obliterated the Roman town of Pompeii sent out an initial wave of hot gas that reached temperatures high enough to turn people’s brains to glass. According to a new study, this short-lived early burst of heat engulfed the nearby town of Herculaneum in a 550°C  inferno (1,022°F), bringing instant death and […]

They say a good tennis player can play in any shoes, and yet for some reason in schools it’s long been enforced that boys wear one uniform while girls wear another when playing sport. Gendered kits would appear to be at best unnecessary, and now new research has found they can be damaging as it […]

Unlike Christmas, Easter curiously falls on a different date each year. While Easter is always on a Sunday, it can sometimes spring up in March and the next year in late April. This year, Easter will be held on Sunday, April 9 (for Western Christians), while Easter 2024 is on March 31, and Easter 2025 […]

Just as promised, Elon Musk has made Twitter’s algorithm open-source meaning everybody is free to trawl through the code and pick apart how it works. Sharp-eyed users quickly spotted that part of the algorithm even features Musk’s name, a feature that he said was unknown to him.  During a Twitter Spaces live event on Friday, […]

Embryo-like structures have been created from monkey stem cells and implanted into female monkeys, marking the first time this has ever been performed. The new research hopes to push forward our knowledge of embryo development and early organ formation, which is typically slowed by ethical concerns.  “The molecular mechanisms of human embryogenesis and organogenesis are […]

It’s not recognized as a psychological disorder in its own right, but if you were to describe “Peter Pan Syndrome” to a group of women in heterosexual relationships, the odds are it would be familiar to some of them. Some of those – maybe by accident – will have found themselves playing the role of […]

Hearing stories of the largest gold nugget ever found, or the recent 2.6 kilogram (5.7 pound) discovery by an amateur aussie gold hunter, you might be fooled into thinking we’ve discovered a massive amount of gold on Earth. Well, it might come as a surprise to learn that all the gold discovered so far could […]

The yellow crazy ant is a skilled invader. Like many invasive species trying to colonize new lands, it adapted to create worker ants that could up their initially tiny numbers, but now new research has discovered that they use a means of reproduction that was previously unknown to science to do it. Male yellow crazy […]

Uranus is surrounded by a system of faint rings, but they are not easily spotted. Before today, only the Voyager 2 spacecraft during its flyby of the planet in 1986 and the Keck Observatory have been able to see them. Now, enter JWST, showing that the latest space telescope is more than up to the […]

Seismic waves reveal thin but dense layers of material sitting between Earth’s core-mantle boundary in parts of the world. One team of geologists suspects it is composed of material that once formed the ocean floor, before being pushed down into the mantle by overriding continental plates. Some parts of the continents date back most of […]

The permafrost of east Eurasian mountains is slowly melting away, helping to reveal the buried bodies of the much-feared Mongol Empire – as well as their unquenchable thirst for yak milk.  New research has studied the remains of a cemetery at the so-called Khorig site, located high in the Khovsgol mountains. Dating suggests that the […]