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This week, a scene from Terminator 2 becomes reality when a tiny person-shaped robot manages to liquefy and re-solidify, researchers claim AI could reach the singularity within seven short years, and we investigate Earth’s only known sample of the rarest crystal on the planet.  Advertisement Shape-Shifting Robot Escapes Miniature Prison Cell By Liquifying Before Re-solidifying […]

Escherichia coli bacteria sometimes organize themselves into sets of four known as rosettes, a trait usually associated with multicellular organisms like ourselves, as a step towards becoming biofilms. The finding blurs what is considered perhaps the most important division among living things, and also raises questions about how we missed something so important in such […]

Picture the scene: a beautiful bright clear California day, the sun is shining, the sky is blue, the ocean is pink. Wait, what? Well, thanks to scientists at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of Washington that’s exactly what you’ll get if you go down to San Diego beach in January […]

Authorities in Western Australia have warned the general population that a radioactive capsule used as a gauge in a mining operation has been lost on a stretch of road that is about 1,400 kilometers (870 miles) long. The risk to the population is considered minimal, but people need to be warned of what to do […]

The town of İznik, in northwest Turkey, may not be as well-known as nearby Istanbul, but it has a history just as long and storied. Once ruled over by followers of Alexander the Great, it eventually became one of the most important urban centers in the Roman Empire, where, renamed Nicaea, it found its major […]

When you think of primates in their natural habitat, your first instinct probably isn’t to imagine them hanging out in the Arctic. But the new discovery of two previously unknown species of prehistoric near-primates, dating back a whopping 52 million years, has shown the unexpected existence of almost precisely that: the oldest evidence of primatomorphans […]

A lot of planes, especially airliners, are painted white. There are a lot of reasons why that is the case, which have to do with comfort, efficiency, and safety. But online, there are also rumors that the white paint is not only lighter in color but also lighter in weight, making the adoption of such […]

Astronomers have known of “spider” star systems for a while. In these systems, a star is being slowly eroded by its companion: a pulsar. Pulsars are the extremely dense and quickly spinning remains of stars after going supernova; they release a lot of radiation, and it is that radiation that kills the partner. Some of […]

Humans are nothing if not an arrogant species. It’s understandable: out of all the various hominid species, we’re the only ones that managed to make it – we fought, foraged, fluked, flu-ed, and fornicated everybody else straight out of the gene pool. But just because we won the war, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some […]

The mineral heliotrope, popularly known as bloodstone, is a type of quartz that has attracted a particularly rich vein of stories and legends that date back at least as far as Roman times. Perhaps the most interesting thing about these is that at least one is easy to test, yet people keep on believing it […]

Pallas’s cats have been reported on Mount Everest in eastern Nepal for the first time in scientific record after scat samples were tested for genetic material. The pivotal poop samples were also made up of Pallas’s cats preferred meals in the region, pika, and one unfortunate mountain weasel, demonstrating that everyone’s favorite grumpy feline’s known […]

When an underwater volcano erupted in 2015 it created a new island as the Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha’apai island emerged from the ocean. It would live fast and die young with just a seven-year lifespan from emergence to submergence, but in those short few years, a team of scientists had time to scan the novel […]

A chance find by an amateur metal detectorist has added to a long-running mystery of archaeology, as a fragment of an Ancient Roman dodecahedron has been found in the small town of Kortessem, in Belgium.  The piece, originally part of a dodecahedron measuring 5-6 centimeters (2–2.36 inches) in size, shows signs of having been repaired […]

A meme as old as time, people from around the world love to lay into Americans for not joining the metric system like pretty much every single other nation in the world. Special examples include using giraffes to measure asteroids, stretched-out cats for furniture, and classic American bald eagles for social distancing – the US […]

Last week, the world met “Toadzilla”, a cane toad the size of a football and six times larger than average. The rangers who found her – female toads are bigger than male – were stunned. Weighing in at 2.7 kilograms, Toadzilla may be the largest cane toad ever recorded. Is this a sign Australia’s cane […]

People in the Southern United States, the Caribbean, and Central America will be able to see a lunar occultation of Mars on January 30. The Moon, which will be 78 percent full, will cover the Red Planet as the two bodies move in the sky. After several hours, Mars will pop up again on the […]

Fast radio bursts (FRBs), incredibly brief but very powerful emissions of radio waves, were only discovered in the last 15 years or so. Their exact cause is a matter of debate; astronomers have discovered some that repeat regularly and others that seem to be a one-off event. Astronomers have now discovered a large number of […]

We all agree math is pretty amazing, but did you know it can literally tell the future? At least, that’s what proponents of numerology believe: that the numerical values of your birth and name can reveal deep truths about your personality and destiny. And, like, it’s got numbers in it, right? So it kind of […]

Artificial intelligence is opening the door to everything from better medicine to possibly speaking to animals. But you don’t have to wait for someone else to build your dream AI. This four-course ultimate training bundle will show you how to get started designing and launching your own machine learning tools. Each course in this bundle […]