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Fossilization is a tricky business; some species preserve only a few bones, while others are discovered with a one-in-a-billion level of completeness. Most would count themselves lucky to find a fossil or two of either kind, but this latest remarkable fishy find comes complete with a belly full of food.  ADVERTISEMENT Discovered in the McGraths […]

Humans are living longer than ever – but even today, few of us will make it past 100. Even fewer will reach 110, or 115. In fact, in the entire world, there are less than 250 of these “supercentenarians” – aka people older than 110 – and only three of those are 115-plus.  ADVERTISEMENT They’re […]

A video going around Reddit shows the terrifying moment NASA astronaut Dale Gardner flew completely untethered in space in order to capture a satellite. ADVERTISEMENT There are a lot of terrifying things you can find in space, from mysterious massive voids 250 to 330 million light-years across, to tiny droplets of water in your space […]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the man in charge of the USA’s health policy, has come up with a new plan for tackling the potential threat of bird flu: let it spread like wildfire through farms. ADVERTISEMENT Currently, avian influenza is devastating chickens in the US, with over 20 million birds dying of the disease, according […]

The world’s population is currently around 8.2 billion. Wait, is it actually? A new study suggests that governments, international bodies, and researchers may have dramatically underestimated the number of humans currently living on Earth. ADVERTISEMENT The reason, they say, is that most datasets severely underestimate the number of people living in rural environments that are […]

A beautiful photograph of a cougar that met its end at the bottom of a lake shows the remarkably intact animal covered in a fluffy layer of algae and sediment. Look online and you’ll find many people debating the origins of the photograph, in some cases stating it shows the early stages of fossilization, while […]

Strange, tiny structures have been found in the rocks around the deserts of southern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Scientists are now confident that these unusual formations were not made by a geological process, but by a mysterious lifeform that remains unknown. ADVERTISEMENT The structures are known as micro-burrows, unusual tube-like tunnels – about half […]

ADVERTISEMENT Despite a relatively short history as a nation, going back just a couple of centuries, there is a precedent for such an ostrich policy. For over 60 years, the US banned the use of the word “tornado” in weather forecasts, forbidding potentially life-saving predictions of their formation. In 1877, Michigan-born John Park Finley enlisted […]

In its dying moments, the Blue Ghost lunar lander captured the first high-definition images of a sunset on the Moon. The lunar nightfall differs subtly from an Earthly sunset, and the images could help unravel a long-standing mystery surrounding an unusual haze first observed on the Moon in the 1960s. ADVERTISEMENT Firefly Aerospace, a Texas-based […]

Things are getting a bit spicy at Mount Spurr in Alaska, where geologists have been reporting an increase in seismic activity for almost a year. Based on the latest developments, officials are now bracing themselves for what could be an imminent eruption. ADVERTISEMENT Located in the Aleutian Arc, Mount Spurr is an ice-covered stratovolcano complex […]

A man in Australia who received a titanium heart has achieved a double world-first, after becoming the only person to survive with the artificial heart for more than 100 days, and to be discharged from hospital with the implant still in place. ADVERTISEMENT The patient, who was in his 40s, had been experiencing severe heart […]

We all enjoy a nice hot cup of joe to perk us up in the morning – or at least, around three out of four of us do, which is close enough. But it makes you think, doesn’t it: if we drink it to wake up, then when should we stop drinking it? ADVERTISEMENT It’s […]

Images have been securely transmitted by satellite using Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) between ground stations in China and South Africa, a record-breaking distance of 12,900 kilometers (8,000 miles). More important than the distance is the drastic reduction in weight, and therefore ultimately of cost, in the transmission and reception technology. ADVERTISEMENT The weirdness of quantum […]

A NASA spacecraft far from Earth has made an unexpected discovery, after turning its instruments towards a dark patch of sky at the galactic poles for over 200 hours. ADVERTISEMENT Studying the background light that is illuminating its journey, the New Horizons team discovered it is much brighter than expected, and they don’t know why. […]

It was a Monday morning like any other in mid-March 1995. But then again, that’s always how these things go, isn’t it?  ADVERTISEMENT As people rushed through the city streets on their way to work, five men stepped onto the packed trains of the Tokyo underground. Although the trains were on separate lines, each had […]

When Howard Carter famously discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922, he found the pharaoh’s body covered in the petals of a type of water lily known as the blue lotus. Containing two psychoactive alkaloids, the flower produces hallucinatory effects and is thought to have been ingested during erotic ancient rituals in which participants sought […]

If there’s one thing you should know about Yellowstone National Park, it’s that it’s always changing – and that can mean the appearance of a brand-new hydrothermal feature, which is exactly what happened last summer. ADVERTISEMENT The feature in question was discovered on August 5, 2024, when a park scientist driving through the Roadside Springs […]

Vaccines do not, cannot, and have not ever caused autism. There is not a shred of scientific evidence to support the belief that they do. Unfortunately, fears around vaccines were so stoked by this myth that vaccine hesitancy got a new boost in the late 1990s, which hasn’t really gone away. The result? Diseases that […]

The velvet worm is pretty cute as invertebrate predators go. A leathery rope of an animal with a fuzzy, velvet-like texture. It has two antennae making it look a bit like Zuul, but when it’s time to fight, it takes inspiration from Spiderman. ADVERTISEMENT Velvet worms are sensitive to air currents, so despite being almost […]

It’s easy to blindly accept that clocks move clockwise, sweeping left to right on the upper half of the face and right to left on the lower half. But have you ever wondered why this is the case? It isn’t dictated by some fundamental law of physics, nor our psychological perception of time, but rather […]