News

Octopuses are everyone’s favorite eight-armed underwater creature with complex brains and serious smarts. How they move, however, is no less than random, with those eight limbs making them look downright peculiar at times. Now, new research has looked at how octopuses use their arms for hunting and discovered some surprising results. “Normally when you look at […]

Enceladus has quickly gone from being just another small moon of Saturn to prime territory to answer the great question: are we alone in the universe? No one thinks Enceladus could be home to sentient creatures, but if it hosts microbes, it would be powerful evidence that life is abundant and that given a chance […]

Miami Beach is considering paying bounties for dead iguanas, after the cost of paying professionals to destroy the creatures rocketed to over $200,000.  Miami Beach has an iguana problem. An invasive species of American iguana (aka green iguana) is flourishing in the area, and causing all kinds of destruction. The species, native from southern Brazil […]

Ever since Neptune’s discovery back on September 23, 1846, the planet has fascinated astronomers worldwide. The ice giant makes a complete orbit of our Sun every 164.8 years and hides its secrets in one of the dimmest parts of our Solar System. But when you shine the most powerful space telescope ever built on something, […]

The sudden halting of menstrual periods (amenorrhea) experienced by prisoners at Nazi concentration camps has historically been attributed to the effects of trauma and malnutrition, although new research paints a considerably darker picture. Drawing upon written historical records and interviews with Holocaust survivors, the study authors find evidence that synthetic steroids were added to the […]

If you’ve ever hung around a post box in the UK, really taking your time to savor the moment of sending in that tax return, you may have noticed a few letters on it, beneath an image of a crown. If that’s happened to you, you are not alone. Every now and then, someone spots […]

Space Force, the smallest branch of the US armed services, has been mocked by the Internet pretty much since its inception. Whether that’s by trekkies for their logo, or by everybody for the fact that their uniforms are the kind of camo that disguises you among trees, which are famously not that abundant in space, […]

An Ebola outbreak has officially been declared in Uganda after a person tested positive for the Sudan species of the virus, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday. This is following six “suspicious deaths” in the past month. Worryingly, it’s uncertain whether the existing Ebola vaccines will work against this rarer species of the […]

We can sometimes think of pain as a purely physical experience – the result of something going wrong or getting injured in your physical body. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth: pain is a physical sensation, but it’s also incredibly tied up with factors like our emotions and psychology. It’s also affected […]

 CC BY-ND People have been exploring the surface of Mars for over 50 years. According to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, nations have sent 18 human-made objects to Mars over 14 separate missions. Many of these missions are still ongoing, but over the decades of Martian exploration, humankind has left behind many […]

For people who work in technology and who are interested in technology, aesthetics often come second. While many of our jobs and lives depend on cold, unromantic machinery like computers and hard drives, that doesn’t mean we can’t brighten them up a little bit. Find a smartphone case that features a graphic or image that […]

Epic images from The Woman King show a powerful Viola Davis starring in a movie that’s already smashed it at the box office with a debut topping $19 million. While the film takes creative license over the true story of the Agojie, an all-female unit of warriors who protected the African Kingdom of Dahomey in […]

One of the best ways to find life beyond the Earth is to study the atmospheres of nearby stars, a role the JWST was designed for. However, even the best telescope is no use if the information it provides is misinterpreted, and one team of astronomers fears that is what will happen. Life has changed […]

Cat’s kneading is also called “making biscuits”, which is pretty adorable, and also makes you want to just smush your face into your cat’s. What is not adorable are the punctures that may be a result of this, which have been designated the name Felis Punctatis. Cat-related zoonotic conditions can be related to mites, fleas, […]

The world of chess is still going through a bit of a rough moment this month, with speculation about cheating against the world champion, offers to play in the nude, and now the world champion again resigning a game – this time after just one move. Let’s recap. At the beginning of September, 19-year-old Hans […]

The earliest evidence of opium use has been found in an ancient burial site in Israel. Not only does the discovery tell archeologists about the trippy funerals of the Bronze Age, but it’s also shedding light on the murky opium trade of the Levant during the 14th century BCE. The story of the discovery starts […]

A top Swiss astrophysicist has shared his optimism that extraterrestrial life could be found beyond our Solar System within 25 years. This isn’t just fanciful thinking, he believes it’s a matter of probability, our flourishing understanding of exoplanets, and the incredible telescopes that are set to roll out this decade. Sasha Quanz, Professor of Astrophysics […]

For one woman, later life was all but scripted. She had mutations in multiple genes predisposing her to early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, and it was all but expected that she would develop the disease in her 40s or 50s. Instead, Aliria Rosa Piedrahita de Villegas, from Colombia, lived healthily until her 70s with no sign of […]

Ant-slayer spiders (Euryopis umbilicata) are the acrobats of the arachnid world. Found in eastern Australia, they spend the day hiding under the bark of eucalyptus trees before coming out to hunt in the twilight. Unlike other spider species, they do not weave a web to catch their prey – they have a much more dynamic […]