News

According to the leading model of the Universe, there is an invisible substance that outweighs regular matter, which makes us, by five-to-one. This is known as dark matter because it doesn’t interact with light. The properties of this substance are still uncertain with no experimental evidence showing it exists. And researchers have considered some pretty […]

A Japanese astronomer has captured a video of a meteorite slamming into the Moon. Curator in charge of astronomy at the Hiratsuka City Museum, Daichi Fujii, recorded the moment of impact from his home in Hiratsuka.  “I was able to catch the biggest lunar impact flash in my observation history,” Fujii wrote on Twitter, as […]

What is the source of the River Nile? While that might sound like a straightforward question, the origin of the longest river on planet Earth has befuddled people for thousands of years. Even today, in an age of prolific satellites and geophysical know-how, the romantic conundrum of the Nile’s source is still not as simple […]

Disney have demonstrated a retractable lightsaber at tech, film, and music festival South by Southwest (SXSW). Videos from the talk show Chairperson of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Josh D’Amaro fire up and then retract the device in front of the crowd. “I have the coolest job in the world,” D’Amaro told the audience, adding […]

Babies’ eyes are still developing when they come into the world. In the first few months of life, their visual acuity and light perception will change, but what about color? It’s an often-repeated myth that all babies come into the world with blue eyes, but the truth is that eye color depends on genetics and […]

Taking pictures of the Moon from Earth is difficult. Unless you have the right kit, you’ll likely end up with a blurry, bright mess. Samsung introduced a system called “Space Zoom” with its Galaxy S20 smartphone camera that it claimed can zoom in to deliver details of the lunar surface, but some are calling foul […]

The thick-shelled river mussel (Unio crassus) has been observed doing something that scientists have never seen before. Incredible footage captured by an international team, led by Professor David Aldridge of the University of Cambridge, shows a female mussel squirting a jet of water through the air and back into the river where these mollusks make […]

Scientists have finally provided a definition of whether erections can be deemed “growers” or “showers”, and found several differences between these penis types. If you’re wondering why right about now, there is actually a noble cause. They hope it might help with making surgical decisions. Advertisement “It is important to be able to predict if […]

You’re walking down a busy street on your way to work. You pass a busker playing a song you haven’t heard in years. Now suddenly, instead of noticing all the goings on in the city around you, you’re mentally reliving the first time you heard the song. Hearing that piece of music takes you right […]

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 […]