Researchers recently spotted a miniature stomach, duodenum, and small intestine hidden among the cells of lung tumor samples. Tumors are notoriously mixed up; cells from one part often express different genes and adopt different sizes and shapes than cells from another part of that same tumor. This discovery was still a surprise, however. The
Month: March 2018
Conspiracy theories seem to be more prevalent than ever, thanks to the spread of the internet and the flame-fanning of social media, but how do they spread? The answer is more complicated than you might think, according to new research. These far-out, implausible ideas about life, the Universe, and everything aren’t solely propagated by
You’ve probably seen the classic piece of “internet trivia” in the image above before – it’s been circulating since at least 2003. On first glance, it seems legit. Because you can actually read it, right? But, while the meme contains a grain of truth, the reality is always more complicated. The meme asserts, citing
Thanks to high school, we’ve all got a pretty good idea about what’s on the periodic table. But whether you’re looking at something common like calcium, iron, and carbon, or something more obscure like krypton and antimony, how well do you know their functions? Could you name just one practical application for vanadium or ruthenium?
We’ve all seen the Terminator movies, and the apocalyptic nightmare that the self-aware AI system, Skynet, wrought upon humanity. And behaviour tests conducted on Google’s DeepMind AI system make it clear just how careful we need to be when building the robots of the future. In tests in 2016, Google’s DeepMind AI system demonstrated
We’ve all heard about the infamous number 666, which is rather cryptically referred to as the “number of the beast” in the New Testament, and has more recently become known as the number of the Antichrist. But what is it about this simple, symmetrical number that’s been giving everyone the heebie jeebies for the past
On March 31, much of the world will get to see a rare event: A second blue moon in one year. It will be the second blue moon of 2018 – at least, according to one definition of the term. And our last until 2020. Despite the name, as many of us have learned
It looks like an alien, but its story is much stranger. And now it’s causing an international incident. Chilean scientists and government officials are protesting a study published in the journal Genome Research on March 22. It’s not the study’s conclusions or science they take issue with, though. It’s the study’s subject: the body
The Sahara, the largest desert in the world, has grown in size by around 10 percent since 1920. Scientists say climate change is one of the most likely reasons why the sands are shifting into new regions. What’s more, this expansion of dry and arid landscapes might not be restricted to the Sahara either,
Scott Wing had spent more than a decade in the badlands of Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin, most of it thirsty, sunburned, and down on his hands and knees, digging endlessly through the dirt. But he had never found anything like the fossil he now held in his hand – an exquisitely preserved leaf embossed on
The bus-sized Chinese space station Tiangong-1, known as “Heavenly Palace,” is whipping around our planet in the final hours before it burns into Earth’s atmosphere. In the very near future, it will break up, with some of its debris likely falling to Earth. In these final hours, Maximilian Teodorescu, a scientific researcher with the
A large crack, stretching several kilometres, made a sudden appearance recently in south-western Kenya. The tear, which continues to grow, caused part of the Nairobi-Narok highway to collapse and was accompanied by seismic activity in the area. The Earth is an ever-changing planet, even though in some respects change might be almost unnoticeable to
Scientists have successfully sequenced genes from people who lived in Africa some 15,000 years ago – and what they found casts new light on the way communities moved and interacted as far back as the end of the Stone Age. Understanding the history of North Africa is crucial in mapping out how human beings
Mass extinctions don’t just come unannounced. In fact, we’re staring down the barrel of the latest one, according to new research. Scientists have determined that, contrary to previous assumptions, there were early warning signs for the biggest mass extinction event in history. We now know what those warning signs are, and there are alarming parallels
In 2016, entrepreneur Elon Musk launched the Boring Company with the goal of one day constructing a large urban network of tunnels. The company is working on two projects in the Washington, DC region and Los Angeles. It first broke ground on a test site in LA in late 2017. In order to bore
Australia is known for it’s strange and adorable wildlife found nowhere else on the planet: koalas, kangaroos, and that giant bird that looks like a dinosaur. And then there’s the platypus – a bizarre and reclusive animal that looks sort of like a duck and an otter had a baby, but fluffier. It’s so
Here we go again: another Facebook controversy, yet again violating our sense of privacy by letting others harvest our personal information. This flareup is a big one to be sure, leading some people to consider leaving Facebook altogether, but the company and most of its over 2 billion users will reconcile. The vast majority
We got second place, everyone! But this medal definitely isn’t good – 2018 has just joined 2015, 2016 and 2017 as a year when the Arctic had the lowest sea ice maximum extents on record. 2018 actually comes in behind 2017, with this year’s sea ice peaking at 14.48 million square kilometres (5.59 million
The first thing you’d see if a nuclear bomb exploded nearby is a flood of light so bright, you may think the Sun blew up. Wincing from temporary blindness, you’d scan the horizon and see an orange fireball. The gurgling flames would rise and darken into a purple-hued column of black smoke, which would turn in
Newly obtained audio of a bizarre UFO incident that occurred in the skies above Arizona last month has been released online, providing first-hand evidence of a strange aerial encounter that nobody at the FAA has been able to explain. The incident, which took place on the afternoon of February 24 in the airspace over
Experiments searching for a solution to one of physics’ most perplexing mysteries have recently been delivering their first rounds of results, setting new limits on where we need to look for evidence. Based on our current understanding of physics, matter shouldn’t exist. The fact it does means something is off in our equations, and
Facebook on Wednesday sought to make it simpler for people to control how their data is used as a massive privacy scandal continues to shake the company and has caused its stock price to drop by 17 percent in the last two weeks. In the coming months, privacy controls that are now in 20
Dark matter is confusing at the best of times. But now astronomers have made an extraordinary and perplexing discovery – the first ever observation of a galaxy with almost no dark matter at all. We still don’t know what exactly dark matter is, but it’s currently the most elegant explanation for some of the
It’s possible that our own human brains are capable of performing advanced quantum computing calculations – and now scientists are conducting a series of detailed experiments to try and find out for sure. It’s easy to think of computers and brains as similar – both process information, and make decisions, and deal with inputs
For decades, little has gotten in the way of albatrosses nesting and nurturing their young on Midway Atoll, turning it into the most important and successful breeding ground for black-footed and Laysan albatrosses. But in recent years, the majestic seabirds have fallen victim to gruesome attacks carried out by an unlikely foe: the common
It’s 9am in Sunnyvale, California and Minni Shahi is on her way to work at the Apple headquarters in Cupertino. Her husband, a former Googler named Vijay Koduri, is meeting his business partner at a local Starbucks to discuss their startup, a YouTube clip-making business called HashCut. Shahi and Koduri’s two kids, 10-year-old Saurav
An alarming study that claimed the gene-editing technique CRISPR could produce hundreds of unexpected mutations in edited genomes has now been followed up by its authors, who say they cannot replicate their controversial result. The acknowledgment – which comes in a report of new mice experiments that didn’t introduce such mutations – isn’t technically
On their own, bee brains are fairly remarkable things, although human computing power still trumps them. But new research suggests that individual members of a swarm behave surprisingly like neurons in a human brain. Not only does this tell us something about how these remarkable creatures interact – studying ‘bee speak’ could tell us
For over 150 years, an ’empty’ coffin lay at a university museum in Australia. So archaeologists got quite the surprise when last June they discovered mummified human remains inside this 2,500-year-old Egyptian relic. The coffin belongs to the University of Sydney, and researchers are now working to figure out whose remains they’ve had on
Once it deploys, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be the most powerful and technically complex space telescope ever deployed. Using its powerful suite of infrared-optimized instruments, this telescope will be able to study the earliest stars and galaxies in the Universe, extra-solar planets around nearby stars, and the planets, moons and asteroids of
When Tiangong-1 rocketed into the sky in 2011, optimists hoped the space station – literal translation: “heavenly palace” – would be a model for a permanent fixture among the stars, a space laboratory that was among humankind’s first footsteps in the Cosmos. So, when an out-of-control Tiangong-1 comes plummeting to earth in a superheated
Ever heard of the interstitium? No? That’s OK, you’re not alone – scientists hadn’t either. Until recently. And, hey, guess what – you’ve got one! The interstitium is your newest organ. Scientists identified it for the first time because they are better able to observe living tissues at a microscopic scale, according to a
What we know for certain is that there are small guppy fish – Poecilia vivipara – on the Fernando de Noronha archipelago, off the coast of northeast Brazil. What’s less clear is how they made it so far away from the mainland, a distance of 345 kilometres (214 miles). These small freshwater fish look
By applying methods used to evaluate the chances of life on other planets, scientists have concluded that Earth is indeed inhabitable – but it’s also becoming increasingly polluted by levels of carbon dioxide and methane. The inspiration for the new research is an experiment run by Carl Sagan and his team back in the
The vast footprint of the Amazon rainforest isn’t just a natural wonder. It’s also a place of mystery and myth – a glorious backdrop to a rich history of ancient societies whose precious ecosystem is now threatened by the murderous expansion of mining greed. Now, that rich history is set to grow deeper still.
The sound of people chewing, slurping, tapping, or humming can drive some people into a rage, and scientists have actually discovered the neurological wiring responsible for this strange condition. Called misophonia, it describes the unreasonable emotions that well up inside some of us when we hear certain repetitive noises being produced by those around
Modern weather forecasts rely on complex computer simulators. These simulators use all the physics equations that describe the atmosphere, including the movement of air, the sun’s warmth, and the formation of clouds and rain. Incremental improvements in forecasts over time mean that modern five-day weather forecasts are as skillful as three-day forecasts were 20
Boiling an egg to perfection sounds like the simplest cooking task in the world, but as anyone who’s boiled an egg knows, you can get surprisingly mixed results. That’s probably because you’re not taking into account all the variables. But if you want the perfect boiled egg every time, quantum physicist Miłosz Panfil has your
1. SpaceX didn’t just launch a Tesla Roadster into space back in February – there was a second payload hidden inside the car. A small Arch (pronounced ‘Ark’) designed to last for millions, if not billions, of years in the extreme environments of space is now making its way across our Solar System, carrying with
The first humans to reclaim Britain at the end of the last Ice Age encountered volatile and abrupt climate change as the great winter faded – but in the face of extreme instability, they showed an amazing resilience, new research reveals. New investigations of the mysterious prehistoric people who once inhabited the Mesolithic site
Once again, a distant star know for its bizarre, unexplained light fluctuations has kicked into action, this time dipping in brightness more dramatically than ever. KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby’s Star or ‘alien megastructure’ star as we like to call it, has dimmed by at least 5 percent – maybe even as much as 10
Back in October last year, there was a very exciting announcement that researchers had photographed two colliding neutron stars for the first time. During all the hullabaloo, Stephen Hawking did an interview with Pallab Ghosh, a science correspondent at BBC News, who got his thoughts on the detection of gravitational waves, black holes, and how
Facebook is back in the hot seat over revelations that data on millions of its users was taken and used by a company working for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Brexit vote. Specifically, a company called Cambridge Analytica (CA) took data from a reported 50 million Facebook users and built personality profiles in
To glimpse a meteor shower, sometimes you’ve got to wake up in the middle of the night, bundle up against frigid cold, and wait many minutes or hours. All to see a streak of light, a piece of space that crosses briefly into our world. Soon, though, all you may need is enough cash.
Even the most fearsome forces of nature can’t escape the laws of physics: the fiery furnace of Mount Etna is slowly sliding into the Mediterranean Sea at a steady rate, according to the latest measurements. It’s the first time scientists have been able to observe the movement of a volcano in its entirety, thanks
When a star goes supernova, it’s such a gargantuan process that it usually lasts for months. So when astronomers caught one lasting just a few weeks, they sat up and paid attention – and found a totally new type of supernova never observed before. The supernova is called KSN 2015K, and it peaked in
A grave dating back to early medieval Italy is a sad testament to the horrors of medicine in the Dark Ages. The skeletal remains of a young woman were found with the skeleton of a foetus between her thighs – and a hole in her skull researchers have determined was likely the result of a
If you really want to teach someone something, starting with a misconception and working backwards is one of the best techniques. A new video from Veritasium does just that. In the new segment, host Derek Muller debunks one of the most common misconceptions about science – namely, that science is simply a steady, gradual way
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