News

As we progress through life, we learn many essential behaviours from more experienced people around us. For example, through observing adults, we go from being babbling babies, to using single words, to speaking in full sentences. This is an example of social learning. And it turns out it isn’t unique to our species. Advertisement Honeybees […]

This week, dysania could explain some people’s physical inability to get out of bed in the morning, a new geological model enables us to look back over the Earth’s last 100 million years, and we reveal why airplane shutters have to be up during takeoff and landing. NASA Can’t Rule Out A 50-Meter-Wide Asteroid Hitting […]

Psychedelic toad slime may be all the rage these days, but it’s thought that people have been tripping on fish since Roman times. In particular, a species of sea bream called salema porgy has gained a reputation for its fishy side-effects, and is known in Arabic as “the fish that makes dreams”. Found throughout the […]

Safe from extinction, 40,020 different plant species are now housed inside Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) in Wakehurst, Sussex, UK. As of March 1, the MSB has banked more than 2.4 billion individual seeds. This vitally important conservation project holds the Guinness World Record for the world’s largest seed bank and contains seeds from 190 […]

The most complex brain map ever created has been released by scientists, depicting the intricate inner workings of the insect mind. They state that the new map could be a crucial step into actually beginning to understand how the brain works, including how thoughts originate.   “If we want to understand who we are and […]

The grim paint color Mummy Brown takes the saying “suffer for your art” to a new level by instead monopolizing on the suffering of others, or at least their death. Made of the ground up remains of mummified humans, it was used for centuries and is thought to have been incorporated into some famous paintings, […]

A few years ago, astronomers excitedly shared the news that a candidate exoplanet was spotted around star 40 Eridani A, which has a particular significance for fans of Star Trek. It’s the system that hosts Vulcan, the world where Spock, T’Pol, and countless other characters come from – but it seems that the planet will […]

The Roman Empire, according to the first-century poet and satirist Juvenal, owed its survival to two things: bread and circuses.  While that may sound tame, what you have to remember is that “circuses”, back in the days of death by multi-species dogpiling and communal poop sponges, meant something a little more X-rated than Bozo the […]

In 1980, a colossal earthquake on the Mount St. Helens volcano triggered the fastest debris avalanche ever recorded, clocking in at 402.3 kilometers (250 miles) per hour, according to Guinness World Records. That’s almost a third of the speed of sound, which travels at 1,234 kilometers (767 miles) per hour.  The avalanche was just one […]

After almost 50,000 years frozen deep within the Siberian permafrost, a horde of ancient, and still infectious, viruses has been unearthed. Remarkably, and also a little worryingly, these “zombie” viruses were still able to infect living single-celled amoebae after re-emerging from their deep freeze, a new study has found. Researchers identified and revived 13 new […]

Monkeys are among the many animals known to use tools, so it is no surprise long-tailed macaques in Phang Nga National Park, Thailand, crack nuts with stones. In the process these “hammerstones” sometimes break. The products look so much like the tools found in Africa and attributed to early hominins such as Australopithecus that scientists […]

In the Bible, it’s said when the Euphrates river runs dry then immense things are on the horizon, perhaps even the foretelling of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the rapture. Revelation 16:12 reads: “The sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up to prepare […]

Scientists have genetically engineered bacteria that don’t cause illnesses in humans but do enjoy getting inside tumors, with this particular interest seen as especially useful to fight cancer. The bacteria act as a mole, infiltrating the tumor and then producing special molecules that alert the immune system, which subsequently attacks the cancer. This bacteria was […]

A team of environmental researchers has estimated the biomass of all wild mammals, finding that humans vastly outweigh all of them combined.  The team, led by Ron Milo of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, was attempting to identify a metric that could be used to track conservation efforts on a global scale. […]

Are British people smarter and more informed than Americans? According to a new study, many Americans seem to think so, and it may come down to a simple difference in how we use a common word. Oscar Wilde famously noted that British and American people “have really everything in common…except, of course, language”. While this […]

Space in Earth’s orbit is getting crowded. The number of satellites in orbit in 2018 was just over 2,000 – but the introduction of megaconstellations such as Starlink has increased the number massively. There are currently 9,000 satellites, and by the end of the decade, the number is expected to reach 60,000. That could become […]

Viral fossils that integrated into our genetic code millions of years ago could be responsible for some subtypes of autism, a new study has suggested. Experiments in mouse models revealed a possible role for these endogenous viral elements and suggest that this should be an avenue for further research. The human genome is littered with […]

The space between planets is not clean and pristine, despite being an excellent vacuum. It has dust, and this dust often catches sunlight creating a faint glow that permeates interplanetary space. The ghostly glow appears visible from Earth as a hazy triangle of light known as “zodiacal light”, and the best time to see it […]

In a bizarre case of wildlife imitating art, an African serval cat rescued from a tree in Ohio tested positive for cocaine, according to the animal rescue group who nursed the strung-out animal back to health. Rest assured, the story has a much happier ending than Cocaine Bear and the wild cat is now living […]