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Competition in the Tour de France is extreme. Riders complete over 80 hours on the bike over 3 weeks, yet the first place finish was cumulatively only around 6 minutes faster than second place. During the event, the training and lifestyle factors that can give athletes a competitive edge are under the spotlight. This year, […]

China has created the first large-scale nuclear power station that is apparently resistant to meltdowns. Although this design cannot be fitted to existing nuclear reactors, it provides a model that can be used for any future constructions. Advertisement How are nuclear reactors cooled? Existing nuclear power reactors require powered cooling systems to operate. The nature […]

The Grand Canyon is a spectacular sight to behold in and of itself, but did you know the surrounding national park is also home to a wealth of prehistoric rock art? Don’t be disappointed if you didn’t – the exact whereabouts of the vast majority of it remains a closely guarded secret. Advertisement Take Shamans’ […]

Ever been crossing a bridge and found yourself faced with hundreds – or even hundreds of thousands – of padlocks? The cultural phenomenon can be seen across the globe, and has even caught on to the point of becoming dangerous in some places, so what’s the deal with all these pointless padlocks? Love Lock Bridge […]

The Statue of Liberty – gifted to the USA by France in 1884 – is one of the most recognizable monuments in the world. Advertisement Picture it, and you probably see its distinctive shade of green (though it hasn’t always been so), the torch symbolizing enlightenment, and the distinctive diadem placed upon her head. You […]

Running to the toilet to pee what seems like every five minutes, only to be greeted with a burning sensation when you do is enough to get many people reaching for the cranberry juice. Downing a glass is perhaps one of the most widely believed “cures” for urinary tract infections (UTIs), but is it backed […]

Rare-earth elements have some fantastic magnetic properties. The strongest magnets we know are based on rare-earths. They are found in many devices, including computing components such as hard disks. And still, tweaking the magnetic properties has not been a straightforward road. Scientists now have found a way to tweak them right at the subatomic level. […]

Power lines are a great place to look if you are in need of birds or shoes. It’s not unusual to see a group of small birds, or a larger bird, apparently relaxing on wires used to transfer electricity over long distances to consumers. So why do they do this, and how come they don’t […]

When you look up at the 200 billion trillion (ish) stars, you probably don’t think about adding another – but NASA aims to launch an artificial “star” over the USA before the end of the decade. Advertisement From Earth, stars appear to have variable brightness based on a number of factors, including how distant they […]

A scientific report has been published on the archaeological significance of the Juukan 2 rock shelter, four years after it was destroyed to make way for mining. We will never know what treasures were remaining to be found at the shelter, but the study of the items extracted previously gives some idea of how much […]

On June 28, 2009, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking sat alone in a college at the University of Cambridge and waited patiently for party guests to arrive. Then he sent out invites. Advertisement Hawking was doing a (presumably, quite tongue-in-cheek) experiment to see if time travel is possible. The idea was that if he sent the […]

In what sounds more like the beginnings of a low budget creature feature than a real-life event, a team of scientists has discovered traces of cocaine in sharpnose sharks living in the coastal waters of Brazil. Advertisement While we often think of microplastics and oil when someone mentions water pollution, cocaine has become of growing […]

At a time when our flabbers be gasted daily, it can be hard to keep track of the biggest and breaking stories in the news cycle. One person, however, seems to have been keeping ahead of America’s latest election developments armed with nothing but asparagus. The news that President Joe Biden was taking himself out […]

To understand how the brain works scientists have been using two broad categories of experiments: ones that record and ones that manipulate brain activity. Early neuroscience studies used electricity to change the activity of neurons. Then, just two decades ago, scientists developed new technologies that used light. Now, they are using magnets.  Advertisement Does it […]

The discovery of a source of deep-sea oxygen has shocked marine researchers, and could force a radical rethink across several areas of science, including the quest for extraterrestrial life. The oxygen is produced not by photosynthesis, but by minerals on the ocean floor. Advertisement High school science classes teach that we get our oxygen from […]

The icy moons of gas giant planets are considered a possible place for the formation of life beyond Earth. Enceladus and Europa have deep oceans with intriguing chemistry buried below an outer shell of ice many kilometers thick. We can’t simply go drilling through such an icy shell. But we might not need to dig […]

One of the rarest types of black holes might have been found incredibly close to Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. This new black hole is of the intermediate mass class, meaning that it’s not light enough to have formed from a star going supernova. But, it is also […]

Deep within a cave in southern Italy, a strangely atypical Neanderthal man has been stuck upside down for around 150,000 years. Named Altamura Man, this remarkable skeleton represents one of the most spectacular human fossils ever discovered and could help to clear up some of the mysteries surrounding our evolution as a species – if […]

All aboard everyone, we’re back on the funky-colored animal train – and this week’s flavor of choice is strawberry! Strawberry-patterned leopards, to be exact. They join bright blue lobsters, black lynx, and white orcas as among our favorite color morphs to be spotted (see what we did there?) in the wild. Advertisement Strawberry leopards are […]

A world-first recording has revealed the harmonious way male African elephants signal when it’s time to move on by vocalizing a bit like a barbershop quartet. One bull begins the call to action, and one by one, the others join in to create a sonorous, infrasonic chorus that rumbles across the landscape.  Advertisement The “let’s […]