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Domestic cats the world over can trace their ancestry back to North African wildcats that lived around 2,000 years ago. It was from these feral felines that the very first domestic cats were produced, yet their cuteness and companionship were so coveted by humans that within a few decades they had spread to all corners […]

The Black Death of the 1300s would have been an undeniably sucky time to live, the year 563 CE was pretty dire, and the first half of the 20th century saw more than its fair share of misery. However, when looking at terrible times to be a human, the dreadfulness of the 17th century is […]

Why do so many barnacles end up hitching a ride on whales? Speaking to IFLScience, Professor Geoffrey Boxshall, an expert on tiny crustaceans at the Natural History Museum London and Fellow of the Royal Society, explained several intriguing reasons behind the unlikely alliance between marine mammals and small, shelled sea beasts.  Firstly, it might have […]

If you’ve grown up in the modern era of microwaves, aka the “science oven“, you may have stumbled across a fairly common myth that they heat your food using the “resonant frequency” of water. How prevalent is this myth? Well, it’s still going around today, nearly 78 years after the first commercial microwave became available […]

Over on Reddit, people are once again asking some interesting physics questions with equally intriguing answers. Today is the turn of Redditor gothreepwood101, who asks “if I had a metal pole long enough to reach from the English coast to the French coast. And a person holding it at each end. If one person pulls […]

Plenty of animals are masters of camouflage, but the genus Poltys needs a special shout-out. Pay close attention or you’ll undoubtedly mistake these strange spiders for a crunchy leaf or a fallen twig. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. Poltys is a genus […]

African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) were only recognized as a species separate from the African savannah elephant (Loxodonta africana) in 2021. Now, new evidence and survey techniques have suggested there could be as many as 10,000 more forest elephants than previously thought.  The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or […]

A recent study found that 47 percent of breeding female elephant seals on South Georgia, home to the world’s largest population of the marine mammal, have died in two years. H5N1 avian flu is responsible for most of this catastrophe, and has now been found among the elephant seals of Heard Island, previously another stronghold […]

There’s a good reason why there’s no road between North America and South America: the Darién Gap, a geographical chokepoint brimming with danger, disease, and violence. In times gone by, many considered the gap to be impassable, but in the 21st century, the region has become one of the busiest – and most perilous – […]

The coldest place on Earth is the East Antarctic Plateau. In this desolate desert, on July 23, 1983, air temperatures at Russia’s Vostok Station plunged to around -89.2°C (-128.6°F), significantly lower than the average temperature here. However, even colder temperatures have since been detected in the remote East Antarctic Plateau. The rest of this article […]

If you have been paying attention to science news lately, you will no doubt be aware of the new photos emerging of comet 3I/ATLAS. The interstellar visitor, which first made its presence known on July 1, being spotted by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), has been dazzling astronomers and the public alike in […]

A halo of gamma-rays detected by the Fermi Space Telescope matches what would be expected if particles with masses around 500 times that of the proton are being annihilated near the Milky Way’s galactic center. A new study argues there is no known source for these gamma-rays, and their distribution is different from what we’d […]

Water in its most familiar form, as you are probably well aware, freezes at a cool 0°C (32°F). But you may have wondered, perhaps while working on your car or considering freezing a leftover curry, what happens when you try to freeze oil? First up, what is actually happening when water freezes? Freezing is what […]

Over the course of four millennia, Native American rock artists in southern Texas followed an unchanged set of conventions in order to portray a cosmovision that continues to be acknowledged by Indigenous groups across the Americas. Drawing upon an “established iconographic vocabulary”, the ancient artists in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands adhered to a particular set […]

We have good reason to suspect that Tyrannosaurus rex could swim. It’s hard to imagine, tiny-armed giant that it was, but it’s true. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. Most animals can swim in some form or another regardless of whether they’re […]

It’s a staple of cartoons and sitcoms alike: that telltale tic that signals a character is right on the very edge of sanity, so stressed out that their body is forced to betray them via a tiny but uncontrollable twitch of the eyelid. Of course, we all know not to take medical advice from cartoons […]

Mars is about to join a currently exclusive planetary club. Until today, the only worlds known to have lightning were Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn. It has long been suspected that the Red Planet, with its whirlwinds and global dust storms, could have some lightning phenomena, just like in the deserts of Earth. Now, researchers have […]

Hominin foot bones found in 3.4-million-year-old sediments in Ethiopia have been assigned to a recently described species. This provides further evidence of different elements of the human family tree living side-by-side in the cradle of humanity and further obscures the question of whether the best known early human fossil was a direct ancestor of ours. […]

A while back, we brought you the story that people have been advised to put bowls of salt in their windows for (somewhat dubious) reasons. Well, it turns out there is yet another winter trend for you to try out: airing your blanket out in the freezing cold. According to those who do it, the […]

We’re not kidding. The average life expectancy of a single crow is about seven or eight years in the wild – but “it’s now 14 years that the birds continue to respond to us,” John Marzluff, a professor of wildlife science at the University of Washington and bona fide corvid expert, told the American Association […]