News

Ever looked a little too closely at the skin of an apple and noticed its surface is covered in thousands of tiny brown, or sometimes white, dots? Well, that doesn’t mean the apple has been sitting out in the Sun too long, or that it’s got some kind of trypophobia-triggering disease. These tiny dots actually […]

Humans aren’t the only animals with numerical awareness, although we are alone in our ability to perform symbolic manipulations of numbers. Taking a deep-dive into the evolutionary roots of our arithmetical tendencies, a team of researchers has uncovered strong evidence that extinct human species like Neanderthals and Homo erectus may have been the first mathematicians. […]

Nothing ruins a nice seaside swim than someone shouting about something swimming in the crystal clear waters, right next to you. While most people might mistakenly call a Portuguese man o’ war a jellyfish, the species is actually a siphonophore, which is closely related. Now, scientists have worked out that the fearsome man o’ war […]

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved lenacapavir, an injectable drug that has been shown to act as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to reduce the risk of sexually acquired HIV. The drug, which is being marketed by Gilead Sciences as Yeztugo, has shown a 99.9 percent prevention rate in a clinical trial involving people of […]

Constantly offloading cognitive tasks onto artificial intelligence (AI) may come at a cost to your brain. According to a new research project, writing essays with the help of ChatGPT diminishes the vibrancy and interconnectedness of your brain’s neural activity.  What’s more, you’re unlikely to remember much of what you wrote, and the essay itself will […]

In late 2026, a human-made object will reach a full light-day away from the Earth for the first time in human history. Space is big, and human-made objects are slow. The record speed any human has ever traveled was set by Apollo 10 back in 1969, and has not been broken since. The fastest human […]

A collection of scientific papers from English mathematician, codebreaker, and father of computer science, Alan Turing, has sold for £465,400 (US$625,000) at auction after narrowly avoiding being shredded. The works include possibly the most famous theoretical paper in the history of computer science, On Computable Numbers, and many other works that “represent the foundations of […]

The Salton Sea, California’s largest lake, is producing more toxic hydrogen sulfide gas than previously thought, according to a new study. The levels are so high that they exceed the state’s air quality standards, posing a potentially greater risk to the health of local communities. The lake is located around 257 kilometers (160 miles) east […]

“We found that sharks follow what’s known as the ‘two-thirds scaling law’ almost perfectly,” explained Joel Gayford, a PhD candidate at James Cook University (JCU) in Australia and lead author on a new study confirming a centuries-old hypothesis about how animals’ volumes scale with their surface area. “Surface area-to-volume ratios are key inputs in equations […]

The coordination shown by tiny-brained ants is even more remarkable than has previously been recognized. Film footage shows longhorn crazy ants apparently anticipating the path others will need to take to bring food back to the nest, and removing obstacles to make it easier, but the real thinking is collective. Longhorn crazy ants (Paratrechina longicornis) […]

The last Ice Age made mountain conditions hostile, and our ancestors mostly retreated to the lowlands if they’d been living higher up before. Even in Australia’s famously hot climate, it was thought the continents’ mountains were off limits to Indigenous people, with no record of a presence through the cold millennia. Excavation of Dargan Shelter […]

A near-complete skull of a Denisovan, one of the closest extinct relatives of modern humans, has never been recovered – or so it was thought. New research has shown that a cranium discovered nearly a century ago in China actually belongs to the little-understood human species/subspecies. The discovery means that science finally has a relatively […]

Goats have horns, cows have horns, and of course, so do rhinos. None of these creatures are even remotely surprising in that capacity, but did you know there’s a reptile species out there with horns that Triceratops would be jealous of? And that species is Jackson’s three-horned chameleon (Trioceros jacksonii).  This triple-horned species is found […]

SpaceX’s Starship continues to explode, and this latest event didn’t even take place in the air.  Starship 36 was not scheduled to fly just yet – it was undergoing a static fire test of the engines. A static fire is when a rocket is locked down and can’t fly as its engines are fired up […]

It’s one of the most widely known biblical scenes in history; even non-believers are likely familiar with it. It all starts with a serpent tempting Eve to eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Eve and later Adam gave in to this temptation and, upon doing so, they gained the knowledge of “good […]

Let’s face it: claiming a connection to some foreign nationality or ethnicity on the dubious basis of a great-grandparent or two is as American as apple pie. You know it, countless comedians know it, and now, science knows it too. “We conducted the largest population genomics analysis of US samples that reflect the nation’s genetic […]

A team of researchers inspired by naturally occurring bubbles trapped in ice has come up with a novel way of using human-made bubbles to encode messages – and store those messages inside ice.  Ice cores are a pretty good way to get an idea of the Earth’s atmosphere in the ancient past, thanks to their […]

Generally speaking if you go outside and take a photo of the Sun every day at the same time (and with the proper equipment) and overlay the photos, you will find that the Sun makes a large figure of eight pattern in the sky. This is known as an “analemma”, and of course is created […]

It wasn’t a popular point of view, even at the time. The ancients, as well as their Dark Ages and medieval successors, figured adherence to the edicts of various gods should be more of a priority than annoying people in the agora with gotcha-style rhetoric. Eventually, of course, that religious outlook gave way to more […]

The Sculptor galaxy is a stunning spiral galaxy, 11 million light-years away, and it is currently experiencing an intense period of star formation. It was discovered by Caroline Herschel in 1783, yet we can guarantee that a new view of the Sculptor Galaxy by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope has never been seen […]