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The Pilbara region of Western Australia is home to one of the most ancient surviving pieces of Earth’s crust, which has been geologically unchanged since its creation some 3.5 billion years ago. Some of the oldest signs of life have been found here, in the North Pole area west of the town of Marble Bar, […]

This article first appeared in Issue 1 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS.  In Naples, Italy, visitors to the ruins of Baiae which sit within the modern city of Bacoli will find a botanical take on Stranger Things’ The Upside Down. Here, from the ceiling of a cave in the Parco Archeologico delle Terme di Baia, […]

In many ways, cooking is just chemistry. You combine acids, bases, proteins, and various other chemicals, and subject them to a myriad of different physical and chemical processes like freezing, heating, mixing, and blending – it’s all classic lab stuff, but with cake at the end rather than, say, five kilos of primo coke. This […]

This week, Neanderthals may have hunted 13-tonne prehistoric elephants, a one-in-10-billion future kilonova is discovered for the first time, and we investigate whether you can actually get filthy rich from panning for gold. Ancient Shipwreck Reveals Unprecedented Glimpse Into Medieval Royal Luxury An archaeological investigation of a well-known shipwreck off the coast of Sweden has […]

Groundhog Day has rolled around again to see what a group of rodents have to say about spring. However, in Canada, tragedy struck as star of the season Fred la Marmotte was found dead just a few hours before the big prediction. The idea goes that when a groundhog emerges from their burrow at the […]

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued an alert advising to stop using EzriCare Artificial Tears eye drops after the product was linked with an outbreak of drug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria. As of January 31, 55 people are known to have been infected across 12 US states. Some have suffered permanent vision […]

Precious ambergris is an unusual auction item. The waxy lumps of whale waste have become a sought-after ingredient in perfumes, but their unusual appearance means people often confuse everything from fat to sewage and palm oil as being “floating gold” when it is, in fact, just pungent garbage. So, how do you know if you’ve […]

The same earbuds you use to listen to music and escape the world could help you connect to it instead. Translators have come a long way since the days of Google Translate. The Mymanu CLIK S was featured at CES 2023 and can automatically translate you or another speaker into 37 different languages. You can […]

Arguably some of the most iconic archaeological artifacts ever to come out of Mesoamerica, the famous Aztec crystal skulls have inspired countless blockhead theories about alien sculptors, psychic technologies, and magic stones. In reality, however, the supposed pre-Columbian relics might just be cheap knock-offs sold by a nineteenth-century French conman. The Story Of The Crystal […]

This article first appeared in Issue 4 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS.  For all of human history, and probably before, people have tried to put any new environment or technology to use for the purposes of food, alcohol, sex, or sport. It’s unlikely space will be any different. Growing food in space has turned out […]

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 […]