News

A domestic king pigeon was recently discovered by a bird rescue group after it had been deliberately dyed pink and released into the wild. Flamingo, as the unlucky pigeon has been named, has it doubly rough. As a domestic bird, it’s not prepared for the realities of life in the wild, making it vulnerable to […]

The question of which substance has the highest melting point sounds simple, but the answer turns out to be “it depends”. Perhaps you were told the answer is tungsten in high school chemistry class, as we were, but it’s not that simple. For one thing, as chemistry teachers and textbooks really should know, a material’s […]

If you’ve discovered an unusual rock you think might be a meteorite but aren’t sure where to start, try your hand at some of these identification methods. Meteorites are fragments of rock from a meteoroid, asteroid, or even a comet that passes through a planet’s atmosphere, ending up on the surface.  There are three main […]

A UFO spotted over US airspace on Thursday, suspected of being a Chinese high-altitude surveillance balloon, has now been identified by Chinese officials in an explanation all too familiar with conspiracy theorists: the object is apparently a rogue weather balloon. “It is a civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes,” a spokesperson from the […]

Old Dad Chiro was the name the father of chiropractic, Daniel David Palmer, gave himself. The Canadian was a successful beekeeper, spiritualist and practitioner of magnetic medicine, and actually credited the early ideas of chiropractic to the ghost of a dead doctor he chatted with on several occasions. Chiropractic treatment isn’t a medical therapy, but […]

The Rosetta Stone, the ancient slab that finally allowed modern archaeologists to crack hieroglyphs, is more famous today for how its message is written than what the message actually says. But just like any historical document, it contains a wealth of information about life in Ptolemaic Egypt – the good and the bad. One such […]

If you’re in the jewelry game, or a treasure hunter, you may be familiar with the term “fool’s gold”. Referring to the mineral pyrite, fool’s gold is named as such because of its uncanny resemblance to real gold. While gold is a valuable metal, its evil twin pyrite is virtually worthless, making cases of mistaken […]

Recently, alarm bells rang after a mining company in Australia misplaced a tiny radioactive cylinder somewhere along its delivery route. An intense hunt was started and the team managed to recover the materials, which experts likened to finding a “needle in a haystack”. For those few days, a health warning was in place and a […]

One of the biggest environmental challenges today is to treat land that is contaminated by toxic elements from industrial activity, elements like arsenic, antimony and tungsten. But these same elements can be brought to the Earth’s surface by natural processes such as the bubbling up of hot springs. So it is valuable to understand how […]

This article first appeared in Issue 4 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS.  Few among us can resist the allure of a get-rich-quick scheme, and upon hearing that a modestly sized arachnid has “liquid gold” dripping from its tail you might find your eyes turning to dollar signs. Could it be that simply milking a few […]

The largest planet in the Solar System is now officially the local big dog when it comes to collecting moons, with a dozen new satellites confirmed to be in orbit around Jupiter. The addition of these 12 previously unknown moons brings the gas giant’s total count to 92, overtaking Saturn’s impressive stash of 83 orbiting […]

A new bill proposed by Massachusetts Democrats proposes that prisoners could be offered a choice to donate their organs or bone marrow in exchange for up to a year off their prison sentence. Prisoners currently cannot donate organs in most states, except for a few outliers in which they can donate to close family members, […]

Humans’ curiosity has seen the space industry explode in the 21st century, as thirst for adventure, discovery, and internet memes has grown. Rocket launches are now ferrying satellites into orbit, sending rovers to Mars, and even giving William Shatner a harrowing account of the overview effect. Great things have been achieved off of humans’ forays […]

“Mini brains” composed of lab-grown human cells can integrate into injured rat brains and respond to visual stimuli, a new study has reported. Previous research has shown that integration into developing brains was possible, but this new study is the first to demonstrate the use of this approach to repair a brain injury. Human brain […]

The only known filmed interview with Georges Lemaître, the Catholic priest and physicist who originally proposed the Big Bang theory back in 1931, has finally been rediscovered – nearly 60 years after it was originally aired on Belgian TV. “What a gem, this interview,” Thomas Hertog, cosmologist and professor of theoretical physics at KU Leuven, […]

Those with dreams of getting rich quick might be willing to try anything from necropants to Bitcoin but unlike the uncertain world of Internet investments, gold famously holds its value. Unfortunately just because you find the biggest nugget in history does not mean you will be set for life. Even today if you pan for […]

A new type of ice is changing our understanding of water, as scientists discovered a frozen structure that more closely mirrors the molecular arrangement of a liquid, despite being a solid. The new ice type is amorphous, to use a polite phrase, which essentially means the organization of its molecules is a mess. Something to […]

The sight of blood and gore can provoke a vastly different response from person to person – while some can binge-watch splatter films with glee, some people can’t bear the thought of the crimson life juice without fainting. Why, if we all (hopefully) have blood coursing through our bodies as we speak, is it such […]

With the radioactive capsule that recently went missing and was then found against all odds, Redditors have been sharing various stories of when people have not been so lucky, and had run-ins with radioactive materials. In one particularly distressing incident in Mexico City in 1962, a family came into prolonged exposure to a radioactive source, […]

Possibly the hardest part of being a good scientist is admitting when you’re wrong – particularly when you are very, very wrong. So full credit to Professor Gregory Retallack of the University of Oregon and team who published a paper that turned out to be wrong by a factor of more than a hundred million, […]