News

The sometimes astonishing sex lives of animals are well known, especially the huge range in penis structures, evolved to increase the number of offspring that males father. For example, ducks have corkscrew-shaped penises, and echidnas (also known as spiny anteaters) have a four-headed penis. But what about female genitalia? For hundreds of years, scientists assumed […]

Gazing upon the wrinkled face of a pug it can be hard to believe that all dogs are descended from wolves. We know older breeds are genetically more similar to wolves than modern ones, but are there some easy-to-spot indicators as to which is which? A new study says yes, as it found that a […]

A woodpecker has filled a house’s walls with acorns, using the wall cavity as food storage. The owners of the house in California called pest control who cut open a hole in the wall, allowing thousands upon thousands of acorns to fall out. Nick’s Extreme Pest Control posted images of the situation to Facebook. Advertisement […]

A care home in Iowa has been fined $10,000 after wrongly declaring a patient dead. The woman, who was 66 years old, had spent almost 50 minutes zipped inside a body bag while being transported to a funeral home before staff members realized she was still alive. She was presumed dead at 6 am on […]

Deep in the genome of Antarctic octopuses, marine biologists have found something odd. Although the work is still undergoing peer review, the most likely explanation is an event over 100,000 years ago with very serious implications for the Earth’s future in a warmer climate. During the 2010 football World Cup, an octopus named Paul achieved […]

A man developed foreign accent syndrome (FAS) as a rare and perhaps unique manifestation of his prostate cancer, his doctors have described in a BMJ Case report. The case describes how a man, in his 50s, was diagnosed with prostate cancer 20 months prior to his speech issues. At that point, he reported notable changes […]

What did our early ancestors eat? It’s one of the central questions in palaeoanthropology. If researchers can understand the diet of ancient hominins, this in turn provides clues as to what they looked like, where they lived, and how they socialized with each other. Now, a new Perspective paper has outlined the modern techniques that […]

So far, the list of animals known to be able to recognize their own reflection is slim, but now it seems the unsuspecting cleaner fish (Labroides dimidiatus) could be the latest addition. A study into mirror self-recognition (MSR) has investigated the reactions of cleaner fish to images of themselves and of other members of their […]

It’s not often in life that scientists get the opportunity to explore a habitat frozen in time for millennia, but when researchers in 2015 began to suspect that a cavernous space was hiding within the rock of south-east Spain, they got a hell of a lot more than they’d bargained for.  It would be years […]

We humans produce a frankly ridiculous amount of data, whether that’s your dissertationfinalfinalfinal.docx word file containing what went on to be your rough first draft of your dissertation, or an adorable video of a panda sneezing.  In 2020, it was estimated that the world produced about 2.5 quintillion digital data bytes per day. By 2025, […]

Sea ice loss in the Arctic may be being made worse by powerful storms capable of shifting vast quantities of water through the air as vapor. Known as atmospheric rivers, they’re increasingly reaching the Arctic even in the freezing winter months when the sea ice is normally given a chance to recover from its summer […]

Scientists have discovered a “new layer” of Earth’s interior that’s made of partially molten rock, gently oozing around some 160 kilometers (100 miles) beneath our feet. Located just under Earth’s crust, knowledge of this zone might help to deepen our understanding of how colossal tectonic plates drift through the mantle and form the shape of […]

“There is a tide in the affairs of men,” Shakespeare had Brutus say. The Bard was speaking metaphorically, but it turns out there are far more real tides than he knew, with the latest being found in the cold plasma that surrounds the Earth in a giant donut shape above the atmosphere. Shakespeare didn’t even […]

A nine-year-old boy from Pennsylvania has become one of the youngest-ever high school graduates after receiving his diploma remotely from Reach Cyber Charter School. David Balogan, who loves science and computers, has already begun working towards his degree in the hopes of becoming an astrophysicist that studies black holes.  According to David’s parents, raising a […]

Astronomers have announced the discovery of a new rare Earth-sized exoplanet. Wolf 1069 b orbits its star in the habitable zone, where water can exist as liquid, vapor, and ice. Of the 5,000 confirmed exoplanets, it’s thought only around 60 might be rocky like Earth and in the habitable zone, but Earth-sized ones or smaller […]

A skull found in the Alaskan wilderness has been linked to an adventurer from New York who went missing in 1976. In a grisly surprise, investigators believe that the man most likely died after being mauled by a bear. Gary Frank Sotherden, then 25, traveled to the Arctic Circle in the mid-1970s to go hunting, […]

A major earthquake has struck central Turkey, near the city of Gaziantep not far from the border with Syria. Both countries have been greatly affected by the seismic event which had a magnitude of 7.8 with the death toll over 1,000 and still rising.  The event struck at 4:17 am local time and was followed […]

When booking a flight, do you ever think about which seat will protect you the most in an emergency? Probably not. Most people book seats for comfort, such as leg room, or convenience, such as easy access to toilets. Frequent flyers (this author included) might book their seat as close as possible to the front […]

This article first appeared in Issue 3 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS. The Grand Staircase is a 160-kilometer (100-mile) stretch of sedimentary rock that was first conceptualized by geologist Clarence Dutton in the 1870s. Dutton saw it as an immense stairway that at one end rises out of the Grand Canyon and at the […]

This article first appeared in Issue 2 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS.  Iceland’s Vatnajökull National Park centers around the country’s largest glacier, Vatnajökull. Its biggest outlet is the Breidamerkurjökull glacier tongue, which as a piedmont glacier formed as the result of a valley glacier meeting flat plains upon which the ice spread out. It once […]