A horde of microscopic critters called tardigrades were passengers aboard the Israeli spacecraft Beresheet, which crashed into the lunar surface nearly four months ago. But because tardigrates can survive in extreme environments, it’s likely these tiny astronauts are still alive. The microscopic organisms can go without water and oxygen for long periods of time in
Dark matter might well be the biggest mystery in the Universe. We know there’s something out there making things move faster than they should. But we don’t know what it is, and we sure as heck don’t know where it came from. According to a new paper, the origins of dark matter may be more
A collection of bird bones sat in lab storage for more than a decade, believed to be the remains of an ancient eagle. Little did scientists know what was hiding in the fossils: “Squawkzilla.” Heracles inexpectatus was discovered by scientists in New Zealand, according to a study published Wednesday. At about 3 feet (1 meter) tall,
In a desperate attempt to re-freeze the Arctic, designers have proposed a wacky and futuristic iceberg-making submarine. By bringing together a fleet of these huge vessels, the team hopes to create new ice fields that will ultimately help balance polar ecosystems. The radical geoengineering proposal was recently awarded second prize in an international competition organised
It’s time to celebrate another first in the field of quantum physics: scientists have been able to ‘teleport’ a qutrit, or a piece of quantum information based on three states, opening up a whole host of new possibilities for quantum computing and communication. Up until now, quantum teleportation has only been managed with qubits, albeit
What’s your usual sleeping pattern? If you’re happily tucked up in bed by 8 pm or even earlier, then you might have what’s known as advanced sleep phase (ASP). It’s a sleep pattern that’s traditionally been considered incredibly rare – after all, these so-called ‘advanced sleepers’ are naturally waking up at around 4 or 5 am,
Researchers have created the thinnest unsupported gold sheets ever created in a lab, producing infinitesimal slivers of the precious metal that are only two atoms thick. These vanishingly thin gold sheets – approximately 1 million times thinner than a human fingernail – measure just 0.47 nanometres in thickness, representing a new breakthrough in the fabrication
You might think that huge galaxies would be hard to miss, but astronomers have just found a whole pile of them billions of light years away. Thirty-nine massive galaxies, invisible until now, are changing our understanding of the early Universe. “This is the first time that such a large population of massive galaxies was confirmed
There are precious few places left in the United States where you can still view a “pristine” night sky, according to a new study in the Journal of Environmental Management. Situated far from the glare of city and small town lights, these places offer the same unimpeded view of the cosmos that our ancestors saw
The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant accident is widely considered one of the worst nuclear disasters. On 26 April 1986, the core of a nuclear reactor at the plant opened during a routine safety test, sending plumes of radioactive material into the air. The explosion and subsequent fires released widespread contamination across Europe, but the most
If there’s one thing seagulls are famous for, it’s their pro-grade pilfering. They steal your snacks, nick your nosh, purloin your pudding, and liberate your lunch. No morsel is safe in the range of a seagull’s beady, greedy eye. But, as scientists in the UK have discovered, there’s a way you can hold them off:
Deep in the Gulf of Alaska, ocean explorers have filmed an unusual see-through squid with saucer-like eyes, iridescent organs and a bright orange crown. Looking at its face, the bizarre creature somehow looks more like a bird than a fish. “It’s a cockatoo #squid (Cranchiidae)!” NOAA recently tweeted along with the video. “Pretty, huh?” It’s a cockatoo
Facebook has removed a mega-viral event called “Storm Area 51”, claiming it violated community standards. Before it was removed, the tongue-in-cheek event amassed more than 2 million Facebook users, grabbing the attention of the mainstream media. The idea, according to the even description, was to invite an army of memelords and alien enthusiasts to raid
Within the past hundred years, water use has been growing at more than twice the rate of the human population. As water supplies continue to shrink, some parts of the world are facing a looming crisis. As of 2019, 17 countries in total are now experiencing “extremely high” levels of baseline water stress, according to
Sometimes the discovery of a new dinosaur species doesn’t require an extensive archaeological dig – it just needs a closer analysis of the dino bones already sitting in the collection of a university. That’s turned out to be case with the newly described Ngwevu intloko. The new species, now named “grey skull” in the South African
Black holes can get pretty big, but there’s a special class that is the biggest of the big, absolute yawning monster black holes. And astronomers seem to have found an absolute specimen, clocking in at 40 billion times the mass of the Sun. It’s at the centre of a galaxy called Holmberg 15A, a supergiant
Two separate prototypes of SpaceX’s Starship rocket could be ready to fly before the end of August, CEO Elon Musk revealed to the Twittersphere on Saturday – though it’s not clear whether the debut would be a short hop or a historic orbital adventure. On August 24, SpaceX will hold a presentation in Boca Chica,
We all know that Antarctica’s ice is melting into the ocean faster than ever, but we haven’t had a lot of information on how exactly that ice makes its way across the continent. A team of scientists has now pored over decades of satellite data to change this, and have developed the most precise map of
On 6 August 2012, after an epic six-month journey, NASA rover Curiosity finally arrived at her new home on Mars. This week marks seven Earth years since touchdown, and we’re celebrating Curiosity’s Landing Day with some of the marvels it has brought us. It’s an isolated existence for the little rover, all alone in the
On Wednesday, July 24th, the people of the Great Lakes region were treated to a spectacular sight when a meteor streaked across the sky. The resulting fireball was observed by many onlookers, as well as the University of Western Ontario’s All-Sky Camera Network. This array runs across southern Ontario and Quebec and is maintained in
Just like our own Milky Way, most of the universe’s galaxies are shaped like spirals, with long swirling arms of cosmic matter stemming from a bright core. Still, they don’t always appear like that to us. When viewed from the side, spiral galaxies can look deceivingly linear, as a new image from the Hubble Space
How much can you learn from a microscopic drop of ancient seawater? More than you might think, a new study shows. Researchers have analysed a series of such drops and arrived at an estimate that the process that underpins Earth’s plate tectonics may have started some 600 million years earlier than previously thought. Plate tectonics – the
When Grandma Fish was just a tiny fry, the Titanic was yet to set sail. Humans had yet to reach the South Pole. The First World War wasn’t even a rumble on the horizon, the first public radio broadcast yet to spill its arias into New York City. As new dating techniques have revealed, one
If you spend any time on social media, it can seem that the general public doesn’t have much confidence in science. People are still arguing that Earth is flat, vaccinations cause autism, or climate change isn’t caused by humans, while science communicators keep providing evidence on topics that have been considered settled for decades or even centuries.
Another ancient star has been found lurking in the Milky Way. Around 35,000 light-years away, a red giant star named SMSS J160540.18–144323.1 was found to have the lowest iron levels of any star yet analysed in the galaxy. This means that it’s one of the oldest stars in the Universe, probably belonging to the second
Astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) have to do just about everything for themselves. Living within this constantly orbiting laboratory, they’re not only crew members, they’re also plumbers, janitors and housekeepers. Just last week, in fact, the team of six astronauts currently on board began a month-long chore that requires taking their trash
July was likely the hottest month in recorded history, according to new data from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) released last Thursday. According to the report, findings from the Copernicus Climate Change Program indicate that temperatures recorded in the first 29 days of July were as hot or marginally hotter than the previous record month,
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced via a tweet on Saturday that he would be launching The Boring Company China, the first international extension of his infrastructure and tunnelling construction company, in late August while in Shanghai for the second World Artificial Intelligence Conference. In another tweet, the founder and CEO of The Boring Company confirmed that it would
Astrobiologists have sent 18 different strains of bacteria up to the International Space Station. They’re not meant to contaminate the already-kinda-gross orbital research center, but rather to determine whether the mineral-leaching microbes could help astronauts mine space rocks during future missions, Space.com reports. If the so-called BioRock experiment pans out, the researchers behind the experiment
The most comprehensive and widely-held theory of how the Moon formed is called the ‘giant impact hypothesis.’ That hypothesis states that about 150 million years after the Solar System formed, a roughly Mars-sized planet named Theia collided with Earth. Though the timeline is hotly-debated in the scientific community, we know that this collision melted Theia
Despite weighing less than one tenth of a gram, a new robot out of the University of California, Berkeley, can withstand the weight of a 60-kilogram (132-pound) person stepping on it — drawing comparisons to a well-known pest. “People may have experienced that, if you step on the cockroach, you may have to grind it
To many, ancient Egypt is synonymous with the pharaohs and pyramids of the Dynastic period starting about 3,100BC. Yet long before that, about 9,300-4,000BC, enigmatic Neolithic peoples flourished. Indeed, it was the lifestyles and cultural innovations of these peoples that provided the very foundation for the advanced civilisations to come. But who were they? As
A Canadian surveillance plane was scanning the waters of Gulf of St. Lawrence when it made a grisly discovery: The carcass of a North Atlantic right whale, one of some 400 remaining in the world, was drifting in the current, much of its skin sloughed off. From there, the news would only get worse. The
A star with an interrupted death sequence could be the progenitor of a type of star that’s totally new to science. Astronomers have just discovered type of very small, very hot star that brightens and dims every few minutes as its outer layers try to maintain equilibrium. The stars have been named hot subdwarf pulsators, and they
The way bats use sound to locate their prey is even more clever than we thought. It turns out that leaf-nosed bats can even find insects that hide themselves from echolocation. In what’s known as acoustic camouflage, insects that sit motionless on leaves can be protected because the echo from the bat’s cry bounces off
When one thinks of Greenland, images of an icebound, harsh and forbidding landscape probably come to mind, not a landscape of ice pocked with melt ponds and streams transformed into raging rivers. And almost certainly not one that features wildfires. Yet the latter description is exactly what Greenland looks like today, according to imagery shared
An international team of astronomers has found a distant exoplanet that’s being deformed into the shape of a football by the brutal gravitational pull of its host star. “This planet is a prototype for ultra-hot Jupiters,” said Drake Deming, astronomy professor at the University of Maryland and co-author of a paper about the bizarre planet
When Jim Stauffer’s elderly mother Doris passed away at the age of 74, he decided to donate her brain to science. Doris had suffered from dementia, and he wanted to help find a cure for brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s. The Biological Resource Centre (BRC) in Arizona seemed like the right option. It was even
Bottlenose dolphins are attentive and flexible parents: The very survival of their calves depends on it. And in some rare cases, their adopted offspring, too. For the first time ever, scientists have witnessed a mother dolphin caring for the orphan of another species as though it were hers. For more than three years, researchers in French
Despite the classic images we can all imagine, the Milky Way isn’t quite the flat disc shape we thought it was: a study published in February showed evidence of serious warping around the galaxy’s edges, and now a second study has backed up the idea of a twisted Milky Way. A team from the University
Baby jumping spiders have vision that’s almost as extraordinarily good as the grown-ups, scientists have discovered – despite the baby spiders being around a hundredth of the size. A new study reports on how this feat of biological engineering is achieved. The teeny tiny spiderlings pack the same number of light-capturing photoreceptors into their four pairs
The Negev desert that sprawls across Israel is one of the driest places on Earth, but deep below its surface is a different story. Held in the sandstone deep underground is a reservoir of fossil water that lay undisturbed for hundreds of thousands of years. Researchers know this water is old, because it can’t have been
He had been in his grave so long that when his family dug him up to burn his heart, the organ had decomposed and was not there. Desperate to stop him from stalking them, they took his head and limbs and rearranged them on top of his ribs in the design of a skull and
Not every volcanic eruption is a Mount Vesuvius-like catastrophe, with rivers of fire and flying rock that rains down on unsuspecting Pompeiians. Sometimes, volcanoes’ summits collapse, forming miles-wide depressions called calderas, which are peppered by eruptive vents. When rivulets of magma force their way out of these vents, those small eruptions can spew dangerous amounts
If we’re being really honest, those trivia stars that know way more general knowledge than they should are already pretty insufferable. But I have bad news – they’re about to get worse. A small study has shown those with good general knowledge might have really efficiently wired brains. And you can bet that they’ll tell
Chase Dekker gripped his camera with anticipation. A couple hundred feet from his seat on a whale-watching boat, the waters of Monterey Bay in California teemed with activity. A group of California sea lions had just come up for air after feeding on a school of anchovies, and following close behind them was the main
Scientists have just discovered something new about gold. When extreme crushing pressure is applied quickly, over mere nanoseconds, the element’s atomic structure changes, becoming more similar to metals harder than gold. It’s the first time this structural state has ever been observed in gold, suggesting properties that could help scientists refine their understanding of how
Dozens of tourists were injured after a massive wave came crashing down on them in a “tsunami pool” in northeast China, according to Chinese media outlets. City officials from Longjing announced that 44 tourists were injured in the unexpected swell, and that the pool is closed for investigation, the South China Morning Post reported. A
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