News

Evolution has sometimes dealt species a bit of a bum deal, and if the pitcher plant Nepenthes rajah could think you’d imagine it might feel this way having adapted to effectively be a porta-potty for small mammals.  These plants are even shaped a bit like toilets, made up of a liquid-filled pitcher with an accompanying […]

What do a little penguin, a baby rabbit, a black rat and a Krefft’s glider have in common? They’ve all been presented to me (when dead) by my animal companions. Chances are, if you live with a cat or dog, you’ve also been brought something similar. So, is it a gift, are they showing off, […]

A new study has delivered some harsh truths about what men and women consider “dealbreakers” in relationships, and it does not mince its words. The research looked at previous cohorts involved in other studies but from another angle, and concluded there are six main dealbreakers across both long-term and short-term relationships: “Gross”, “Addicted”, “Clingy”, “Promiscuous”, […]

The remnants of a biblical breakfast have been revealed in the Levant, where archaeologists have uncovered eight ostrich eggs near a fire pit used by desert nomads in ancient times. Dated to between 4,000 and 7,500 years ago, the giant ova were found during an excavation of the Nitzana sand dunes in Israel’s Negev Desert. […]

JWST has confirmed the existence of an exoplanet for the first time. The space telescope has provided the definitive measurements of LHS 475 b, confirming that it is indeed a planet, and was able to establish its size and a bit about its atmosphere. The planet is almost the size of our planet, with a […]

How will you look in 30 million years’ time? Probably not good, unless you happened to stumble into a vat of sap in your final moments, in which case you might just come out looking as fabulous as a flower whose pollen was recently tested after having spent over 33 million years preserved in amber. […]

Priapus was a Greek god with one stand-out feature: throughout his life, he was afflicted with a large and permanent erection. The story goes that he came to be endowed with the abnormality over a feud between his mother, Aphrodite, and Hera, the goddess of marriage and birth. Hera was burned following the Judgement Of […]

Genetic analysis has unveiled a previously unknown group of people who lived in Siberia during the last Ice Age around the borders of modern-day Russia, China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan. It appears this mysterious group of people also had links to the multiple waves of humans who made the daring journey to North America.  By the […]

If anyone accuses you of “living in a bubble” there is an astronomically correct, if not always convincing, response: we all do. The Sun sits inside what is known as the Local Bubble, a space within the Milky Way galaxy some 1,000 light-years across in which interstellar material is scarce. It can be hard to […]

Elon Musk, formerly the world’s richest man, has set a new world record by losing the largest amount of personal fortune of any person in history. According to Guinness World Records, Musk has lost around $182 billion since November 2021. Other estimates put the losses – fueled largely by a fall in Tesla stock – […]

The importance of the UK’s first meteorite in 30 years, collected after being seen falling, has been confirmed with the discovery of amino acids – organic compounds essential for life on Earth. The concentration of amino acids and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) is not as high as in some other asteroid remnants (just 1.1 and […]

A surgeon who has previously made plans to conduct head transplants (or should that be body transplants?) has claimed in an editorial that whole brain transplants are now “technically feasible”. Neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero hits headlines every now and then, usually due to claims about taking heads from one thing and placing them on the body […]

Over the last several years, radio astronomers at the Green Bank Telescope have been working on developing a prototype system to use radar to create images of distant bodies of the Solar System. That includes planets and moons, but also asteroids and comets, including those that could be dangerous to us. A full version of […]

Intermittent fasting in a 16:8 routine could result in a number of positive health outcomes and reduce fatigue, according to a study. The study followed participants who fasted for 16 hours for five days a week over a three-month period and found that multiple markers of good health increased, alongside a decrease in a marker known […]

On the outskirts of Rome, there is the Colli Albani: a series of towns renowned for their delicious traditional regional cuisine. But we are going to suggest that if you’re passing through Marino, you stop at a McDonald’s – because underneath it, you can explore an ancient Roman road and see the burial place of […]

If you haven’t tried it yet, go and test out OpenAI’s ChatGPT – it’s scarily good at writing. It will write a semi-original article (the information will be taken from internet sources but it passes plagiarism checkers just fine), cite sources within the text, and the grammar is almost spot on. The AI is so […]

A new report describes a case of a rare neurological condition called sixteen syndrome, one of a family of disorders with similarly numerical names. The condition is so unusual that only a handful of cases have appeared in the medical literature before – and, in this particular case, the patient’s symptoms could also help medics […]

You wake up in a haze. Head pounding. Stomach churching. The stale smell of last’s night overindulgence on your breath. You wonder, how long can this go on? Well, according to this medical case report, perhaps up to 4 weeks. In 2007, doctors in Scotland reported the case of a man who experienced a headache […]

As you drift off to sleep, you may have experienced the feeling of falling, accompanied by an involuntary jerk that forces you awake again. If you have, you are not alone. It has been a topic of discussion on Twitter this week, after author Holly Seddon tweeted about it, and others said they’d had the […]

A myth passed down by Indigenous Australians for 7,000 years may be a record of an actual event. For thousands of years, the Gugu Badhun Aboriginal people have lived in the upper Burdekin River valley in Northern Queensland. Surviving likely from before the written historical records of Egypt or Mesopotamia, several tales of death, destruction, […]