Only days after a devastating earthquake and tsunami struck the Indonesian island of Sulawesi – killing at least 1,347 people – survivors now have another powerful force of nature to reckon with. Months of increased activity at the Mount Soputan volcano on Sulawesi culminated in an eruption this morning, producing an ash column estimated to
Given the abundance of moons in our own Solar System, you’d think there are heaps orbiting exoplanets, too. Such exomoons have been elusive until now – but it looks like that has finally changed. Last year, astronomers Alex Teachey and David Kipping of Columbia University announced they’d spotted the very first exomoon candidate in data
After studying hundreds of recently discovered exploding stars, physicists have concluded it’s unlikely there are sufficient numbers of primordial black holes out there to account for the dark matter phenomenon. This doesn’t mean the category of material referred to as massive compact halo objects (MACHOs) can’t contribute to the unseen 84 percent of the Universe’s
There’s no denying that sloths are weird creatures. They risk their lives every time they poo, their organs are stuck to their bones, and finding a mate looks like a nightmare. Now we can add an extra feature to the sloths’ repertoire: their metabolism is so weird, scientists have never seen it before in the
Stinging trees grow in rainforests throughout Queensland and northern New South Wales in Australia. The most commonly known (and most painful) species is Dendrocnide moroides (Family Urticaceae), first named “gympie bush” by gold miners near the town of Gympie in the 1860s. My first sting was from a different species Dendrocnide photinophylla (the shiny-leaf stinging
Facebook announced on Friday that its engineering team had discovered a security issue affecting almost 50 million accounts. Due to a flaw in Facebook’s code, hackers were able to take over an account and use it in the same way you would if you had logged into the account with a password. The company says
Scientists have mapped out how choice overload works in the brain, showing how our minds can back off from making a decision if the number of options gets too big. This kind of indecision has been noted in previous studies, but this new research identifies the areas of the brain that help us make a
Earth is in a constant state of flux. Over a geologic time scale of millions and billions of years, hot rocks rise up from the planet’s molten core, and colder rocks sink. But this creeping, eternal exchange is broken. Something has disrupted the system – called mantle convection – resulting in a freak geophysical phenomenon
The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded Tuesday to Arthur Ashkin, Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland for their pioneering work to turn lasers into powerful tools. Ashkin, a researcher at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, invented “optical tweezers” – focused beams of light that can be used to grab particles, atoms and even living
The name is not appetising: it’s called the groundcherry. It’s possible you haven’t heard of this fruit, but with some genetic tweaks, it could become a supermarket staple sooner than you think. That’s because scientists have used the groundcherry as an experimental test case to illustrate just how quickly CRISPR genome editing can speed up
The hypothetical, massive outer Solar System body Planet X is still proving elusive, but the hunt for it has yielded up a different find: a tiny dwarf planet, roughly 2.5 times Pluto’s distance at the time it was found. It’s called 2015 TG387 and nicknamed “the Goblin”. Also, it’s pretty small even for a dwarf
An international team of scientists has discovered evidence of common bacteria living so far underground and away from sunlight that we may have to re-evaluate the habitability of deep subsurface ecosystems – including those of alien worlds. There’s a deep terrestrial environment – sometimes called the ‘dark biosphere’ – that extends hundreds of metres into
Every time your dog does that thing you’ve trained her to do, you pet her and praise her. “Clever girl,” you say. “Who’s the goodest and cleverest girl of all?” Well – it’s probably not your dog. According to the latest research, the much-vaunted canine intelligence may not actually exist. Dog smarts, they have concluded, are
Kerry McKinnon of Strathdownie, Australia, didn’t know what she was going to find when her husband woke her up and told her to come quick. Happily, it was good news – a baby koala had decided to take up residence in the warm fur of their five-year-old golden retriever, Asha. “[Asha] kept looking back at
Neuroscientists have successfully hooked up a three-way brain connection to allow three people share their thoughts – and in this case, play a Tetris-style game. The team thinks this wild experiment could be scaled up to connect whole networks of people, and yes, it’s as weird as it sounds. It works through a combination of
Animals don’t always stick to traditional menus, and they certainly don’t read the descriptions of their diets we include in textbooks. When it recently emerged that a notorious carnivore (a shark) was actually selecting the vegetarian option, scientists were intrigued. We’ve known for some time that bonnethead sharks consume large quantities of seagrass, but this
They don’t call Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson ‘The Mountain’ for nothing. In 2015, the strong man and Game of Thrones actor broke a millennium-old record by taking – or more accurately, staggering – five steps with a 650 kilogram (1,430 pound) log on his back. To most of us, this was simply an extraordinary example of
Martin Rees, a well-respected British cosmologist, has made a pretty bold statement when it comes to particle accelerators: there’s a small, but real possibility of disaster. Particle accelerators, like the Large Hadron Collider, shoot particles at incredibly high speeds, smash them together, and observe the fallout. These high speed collisions have helped us discover lots
NASA’s got a whole new plan. It wants boots on the Moon in 10 years and on Mars in 20. Give or take. On Wednesday, the space agency announced its detailed National Space Exploration Plan to achieve the President’s lofty goals set out in his December 2017 Space Policy Directive-1. Those bold plans include: planning a new Moon landing,
Life just got worse for the 50 million people caught up in what may be the biggest hack of Facebook ever. On Friday, the Silicon Valley tech firm revealed that it had detected a security breach in which an as-yet unknown attacker, or attackers, managed to gain access to tens of millions of users’ accounts by exploiting vulnerabilities
NASA is targeting technosignatures in its renewed effort to detect alien civilizations. Congress asked NASA to re-boot its search for other civilizations a few months ago. Their first step towards that goal is the NASA Technosignatures Workshop, held in Houston from September 26th to 28th, 2018. If you’ve never stared out to space at night and
The human brain is a remarkable thing. It can do things our primate relatives are thousands – maybe even millions – of years of evolution away from, and our most complex machines are not even close to competing with our powers of higher consciousness and ingenuity. And yet, those 100 billion or so neurons are also incredibly fragile. If
A new study links rapid deoxygenation in the Gulf of St. Lawrence to two powerful currents: the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current. The broad, biologically rich waterway in Eastern Canada which drains North America’s Great Lakes and is popular with fishing boats, whales, and tourists has lost oxygen faster than almost anywhere else in
Over the past few days, the mathematics world has been abuzz over the news that Sir Michael Atiyah, the famous Fields Medalist and Abel Prize winner, claims to have solved the Riemann hypothesis. If his proof turns out to be correct, this would be one of the most important mathematical achievements in many years. In
A magnitude 7.5 earthquake has struck off the coast of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, triggering a 1.8-metre (6-foot) tsunami. The wave tore through several of the island’s coastal cities and towns, including the capital Palu, on Friday. The devastating quake has been followed by multiple strong aftershocks, and comes shortly after a magnitude 6.1
A hacker gained access to nearly 50 million Facebook user accounts by exploiting a weakness in the social network’s systems, Facebook said on Friday. News of the cyber attack – which appears to be one of the most significant in Facebook’s history – sent shares of the company down roughly 3 percent in midday trading on Friday,
There’s been more scientific debate over the title of the world’s biggest bird than you might have realised, with many candidates coming and going down the years as new discoveries and new research has come to light. Now though, we may finally have a winner. Presenting Vorombe titan, a new species of flightless elephant bird
More than half of the world’s orcas are threatened by a group of toxic industrial chemicals that accumulate in their blubber and can be passed on from mother to calf. That’s according to a new study led by scientists in Denmark and published in the journal Science. Orca populations found in the most polluted seas
The Large Hadron Collider is at it again, showing us new wonders in the world of particle physics. Scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) collaboration have observed two new particles that have never been seen before – and seen evidence of a third. The two new particles, predicted by the standard quark
We know, we know, there’s so much internet to read, and so little time. That’s why we’ve been rounding up the week’s most interesting science news for a quick catch-up, with a bonus quiz challenge to keep it entertaining. Answers are at the bottom of the page. Have fun! 1. A Renowned Mathematician Announced He
You’d probably think that a city with a feral cat population and a feral rat population would end up with fewer rats due to the work of… the feral cats. But it turns out that, just like humans, cats may prefer the path of least resistance – and that includes opting for easier prey. On
In the autumn of 1929, Anne Morrow Lindbergh and her husband Charles flew across the Yucatán Peninsula. With Charles at the controls, Anne snapped photographs of the jungles just below. She wrote in her journal of Maya structures obscured by large humps of vegetation. A bright stone wall peeked through the leaves, “unspeakably alone and
Earlier this week, Japan’s space agency Jaxa made history by landing a pair of hopping rovers on an asteroid known as Ryugu, and sending back the first-ever images from the surface of a space rock. If that wasn’t awe-inspiring enough, Jaxa has just released not only more images, but even a small video from Ryugu’s
The plants of the Arctic, typically very low-lying shrubs, are getting taller as the region warms up because of climate change, new research has revealed. Existing plant species are growing in height and taller plants are moving into the neighbourhood too. How that affects the delicate ecosystems and carbon cycles of the Arctic is yet
Roughly 24,000 light-years away from Earth, in the constellation of Cassiopeia, is a dead star that shouldn’t exist. Not, that is, according to current theory. The neutron star, accreting material from a much larger binary companion, is spewing out relativistic jets. The problem is that it also has a strong magnetic field. And relativistic jets
Psychologists call it the dark triad: an intersection of three of the most malevolent tendencies of human nature – psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. But the truth goes deeper, and darker. There’s also egoism, sadism, spitefulness, and more. And behind this rogues gallery of all our worst inclinations on the surface, a central, common core of
Clever and strange, octopuses are fascinating creatures with incredible problem-solving skills and breathtaking camouflage. But overall, they are short-lived, typically around for just one to two years. That’s because they’re semelparous, which means they reproduce just once before they die. With female octopuses, once she’s laid her eggs, that’s it. In fact, the mother even stops
A team of researchers in the UK have observed matter falling into a black hole at 30 percent the speed of light. This is much faster than anything previously observed. The high velocity is a result of misaligned discs of material rotating around the black hole. The galaxy in the study is named PG211+143 and
Being face to face with wild animals can be a source of great amazement. But there is such a thing as being too close to them, to the point where you become collateral between a carnivore and its flailing prey. This was the recent experience of adventurer Kyle Mulinder, who was kayaking with some friends
There are just a few hundred of them left in the wild – and now the population of critically endangered Sumatran tigers in the Indonesian jungle has suffered a blow after a magnificent animal was killed in a senseless accident. A hunter hoping to snare a wild pig on the island of Sumatra found not
A satellite orbiting Mars has taken a remarkable yet potentially somber photo of NASA’s longest-lived robot on the red planet. That robot is the Mars Opportunity rover, which is about the size of a golf cart, landed in January 2004, and was supposed to last 90 days. However, Opportunity has explored Mars for more than
We all know that Earth is old, but it’s hard to put into perspective just how old it is. After all, what does 4.5 billion years really mean? How do you even comprehend that amount of time with our short-lived human brains? Well, Business Insider has done a pretty incredible job of it in this
Humanity is producing so much data every single minute that we either need to slow down, or scientists need to crack the problem of finding better ways of storing that data ASAP. Now, new research has taken us one step closer to the ultimate in compact data storage: putting data on a single atom. As the basic
Across the world, the buzz of bee colonies is growing faint, and hives are failing. In what’s been described as “ecological armageddon”, this vital pollinator is vanishing. Scientists aren’t entirely sure why. Strong evidence exists linking the decline to pesticides, but new research shows another poison – one long believed to be harmless to animals
In 1954, archaeologist Samuel Lothrop described the horror show of an ancient burial site he’d excavated in Panama. Hacking, mutilation, sacrifice, people buried alive, cannibalism, flesh stripped from bones, decapitation for the purpose of trophy-taking – it was all there. Since then, the paper has been cited over 35 times as evidence of the culture’s
Centuries of human exploitation in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest – one of the world’s most important forests – has left it nearly empty, according to new research. More than half of the subtropical forest’s local mammal species have been wiped out since Europeans colonised the region in the 16th century, according to the study published in
Four years ago a viral campaign wooed the world with a promise of fighting climate change and jump-starting the economy by replacing tarmac on the world’s roads with solar panels. The bold idea has undergone some road testing since then. The first results from preliminary studies have recently come out, and they’re a bit underwhelming.
Scientists in Australia have solved a bizarre mystery from earlier in the month, when a mother in Queensland found that orange slices she’d cut up for her two-year-old son had puzzlingly transformed overnight. Hours after being segmented, these orange chunks were no longer orange, but had morphed into a vibrant purple. The fruit reportedly had
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 60
- 61
- 62
- 63
- 64
- …
- 80
- Next Page »