Hawaii’s continuously erupting Kīlauea has been pretty busy this week, creating short-lived islands and hurling lava bombs at unsuspecting tourists over the last few days. On Monday morning, a lava bomb (a flying chunk of molten rock) hit a tour boat, injuring 23 people, and damaging the boat roof and railing. According to officials, 13
That diamond on your wedding ring isn’t as rare as you might think. Using sound waves, scientists uncovered a cache of diamonds distributed deep below the Earth’s surface, and it amounts to over a quadrillion tonnes of the precious mineral. (Yes, you read that right.) That’s according to a new study published by a team
Historians and archaeologists have traditionally linked bread to the dawn of agriculture, when people domesticated plants such as wheat, cultivated them and ground them into flour. But a new discovery of blackened crumbs at an ancient stone building in the Middle East indicates that people were baking bread thousands of years earlier. Based on the
Large algae seaweeds known as kelp have been able to float some 20,000 kilometres (12,427 miles) from the southernmost reaches of the Indian and Atlantic oceans all the way to the shores of Antarctica – a trip previously thought to be impossible. Not only is it an incredible journey, it’s the first hard proof that
An entire previously unknown burial complex has been uncovered in the Egyptian desert necropolis of Saqqara. The finds centre on a mummification workshop, where priests prepared the bodies of the deceased for burial – a burial shaft in its middle tunnelled up to 30 metres (98 feet) underground. Down this shaft, archaeologists found a number
Australia is responsible for over 13 thousand tonnes of plastic litter per year. At the end of June 2018, the Australian government released an inquiry report on the waste and recycling industry in Australia. One of the recommendations was that we should phase out petroleum-based single-use plastics by 2023. This means a real social shift,
Nuclear weapons are humankind’s most fearsome creations. In a matter of minutes, one nuclear-armed nation can level dozens of cities, spread radioactive fallout for hundreds or thousands of miles, and wreck Earth’s climate. Most people are familiar with the basics: Slap together enough uranium or plutonium and – kaboom! – you have a nuclear blast.
Narcissists aren’t hard to spot. You can tell them from the way they act, how they’re raised, or where they live. Even, apparently, their eyebrows. But where does this grandiose sense of self-importance and entitlement actually come from? A new study from psychologists in Germany suggests the answers might not be as simple as what
A blood pattern analysis of the Shroud of Turin has revealed that there’s just absolutely no way the stains could have been made by a body laying flat on the fabric. A pair of researchers have found that the blood-like splotches on the linen cloth are inconsistent with each other – some can only have
It sounds like a line out of a horror movie. On Friday Ryanair flight FR7312 rapidly lost altitude and had to make an emergency landing in Germany, and over 30 passengers were taken to hospital. Some of the passengers were bleeding out of their ears, while others had headaches, ear aches and nausea. During a
A new video tells you what the pharmaceutical company doesn’t want you to know: a miracle cancer cure, discovered in 1816 and derived from moss, totally works and is easy to purchase online. The video, as Wired reported, quickly racked up millions of views. But those who followed the video description’s instructions to “Watch until
Since it arrived in orbit around Jupiter in July of 2016, the Juno mission has been sending back vital information about the gas giant’s atmosphere, magnetic field and weather patterns. With every passing orbit – known as perijoves, which take place every 53 days – the probe has revealed things about Jupiter that scientists will
Space agencies and private companies already have advanced plans to send humans to Mars in the next few years – ultimately colonising it. And with a growing number of discoveries of Earth-like planets around nearby stars, long-distance space travel has never seemed more exciting. However, it isn’t easy for humans to survive in space for
Landing 12 people on the Moon remains one of NASA’s greatest achievements, if not the greatest. Astronauts collected rocks, took photos, performed experiments, planted some flags, and then came home. But those week-long stays during the Apollo program didn’t establish a lasting human presence on the Moon. More than 45 years after the most recent
Star-shaped gold nanoparticles, coated with a semiconductor, can produce hydrogen from water over four times more efficiently than other methods – and could lead to better ways to store solar energy, a new study shows. The discovery could also lead to other advances that could boost renewable energy use and fight climate change, researchers say.
A jaguar at the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans slipped out of its enclosure and went on a territorial killing rampage sometime overnight, attacking four alpacas, an emu and a fox trapped in their own habitats before zoo officials managed to sedate it. The big cat was first reported missing at 7:20 am, before the
A mega new telescope has captured the clearest view to date of the centre of our Milky Way. The fiery image shows in extraordinary detail the region surrounding the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy – a target 25,000 light-years away. The telescope is called the MeerKAT radio telescope, and it’s actually
An 11 million-ton iceberg is parked precariously close to the tiny village of Innaarsuit — a glacial faceoff that pits 169 residents of Greenland against the biggest iceberg many have ever seen. Their fate could be entirely dependent on the weather forecast. If a strong enough wind blows at the right time, the berg could
Tianqi Sun, CEO of robotics firm Vincross, has created a delightful mod of his robot Hexa which cares for a houseplant when the owner is too forgetful to water it. Hexa is a small crab-like looking robot, which is available to buy for $US949 and is designed to give people the chance to experiment with
Eight critically endangered black rhinoceroses died after being moved from parks near Kenya’s capital to a sanctuary in a national park in the country’s southeast, the government said Friday. Preliminary investigations suggest the rhinos suffered from salt poisoning as they adapted to water with higher saline levels than they were accustomed to, according to tourism
An empty, overturned wooden boat has been found drifting off Japan’s western coast, and it could mark the start of another flood of “ghost ships” from North Korea to wash up on Japan’s shores. The vessel, measuring 8-meters (26-feet) long, was found floating in a rocky area off the island of Hokkaido on Wednesday afternoon,
If you’re the type who fusses over recycling and using cold water to save the planet, boy do we have some news for you. Research shows that the best ways to cut down on your carbon footprint are actually not the ones typically recommended by governments and textbooks. And there’s one life choice in particular
A vaping pilot on board an Air China Boeing 737 is believed to have caused his plane to make an emergency descent in search of breathable air on Tuesday. The BBC, citing Chinese investigators, reported that the first officer of Air China Flight CA106 accidentally shut off the plane’s air conditioning system – causing insufficient
The Kepler space telescope has had a relatively brief but distinguished career of service with NASA. Having launched in 2009, the space telescope has spent the past nine years observing distant stars for signs of planetary transits (i.e. the Transit Method). In that time, it has been responsible for the detection of 2,650 confirmed exoplanets,
An asteroid discovered orbiting the Sun in December last year has revealed a fun surprise: it’s not one asteroid, but two, locked in their own binary orbit around a mutual centre of gravity. The object is called 2017 YE5 (as in “YE5 a surprise second asteroid, hooray!”)*, and when it was first detected on 21
Thirteen thousand years ago, an ice age was ending, the Earth was warming, the oceans were rising. Then something strange happened – the Northern Hemisphere suddenly became much colder, and stayed that way for more than a thousand years. For some time, scientists have been debating how this major climatic event – called the “Younger
The words “published in a peer reviewed journal” are sometimes considered as the gold standard in science. But any professional scientist will tell you that the fact an article has undergone peer review is a long way from an ironclad guarantee of quality. To know what science you should really trust you need to weigh
An Egyptian archaeological mission found an enormous sarcophagus – the largest ever to be found in Alexandria – made from a striking black marble. It’s been closed for 2,000 years, according to Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities, and no one knows who’s inside. “Experts have not yet determined to whom the tomb belongs,” Mostafa Waziri, the
Photos of what might be a dead juvenile blue whale have recently surfaced online, allegedly showing the catch of Icelandic whalers. It’s a species that the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) says hasn’t been deliberately killed since 1978. If confirmed, this will cause serious problems for the whalers in question, as it’s
Want to see something really amazing? Well, you can enjoy this video of an iceberg breaking off Helheim Glacier in eastern Greenland. Filmed by scientists on June 22, it shows an absolutely huge 6.4-kilometre (4-mile) chunk of ice making a break for the sea. Iceberg calving, as it is known, is not unusual. It’s a
Quick question – if you found a strange-looking fossil on your property, would you a) call the press, b) call the experts, or c) do neither because, well, who needs that kind of attention? For those who went with c, you have a kindred spirit in a farmer who stumbled on a giant four-tusked skull
Phil and Anthony Butler aren’t just father and son. The physics professor and bioengineering professor (respectively) are also business partners. And this week, their company, MARS Bioimaging, unveiled a first-of-its-kind X-ray scanner 10 years in the making. First, a quick recap of how X-ray imaging works. When X-rays travel through your body, they’re absorbed by
When NASA confirmed the Curiosity rover had found traces of complex organic compounds on Mars recently, it wasn’t just a promising sign that the building blocks of life might exist on the Red Planet. Curiosity’s ongoing discoveries have also turned up a crucial piece of chemical evidence, shedding light on a strange scientific mystery that
Finally, scientists have found the source for a high-energy cosmic neutrino coming from outside our galaxy. The so-called mysterious “ghost particle”, detected on 22 September 2017, travelled 4 billion light-years to reach us, originating from an extremely energetic object called a blazar. It’s an amazing discovery, one that not only confirms blazars as a source
Have you ever looked at your partner lovingly and felt your heart flutter, palms sweat, or mood instantly get better? That’s because falling in love actually changes what happens in your body – for the better. When in love, neurochemicals like dopamine and oxytocin flood our brains in areas associated with pleasure and rewards, producing
Of all the animals, humans have evolved pretty spectacular hands. Our particular manual configuration is unique in the animal kingdom, which means we were probably doing something differently from our primate cousins. Now anthropologists think they have figured out a previously overlooked activity: cracking open bones to get to the rich, fatty, calorie-dense marrow inside.
The t-shirt representation of human evolution as a sequence of hunched primates standing tall is a popular cliché. Of course, deep down we know it has to be more complicated. New research argues we seriously don’t know the half of it – the journey of humanity is far more diverse than we ever imagined. Scientists
We Earthlings are about to get a pretty cool celestial moment. A supermoon delivering a partial solar eclipse, falling on Friday the 13th – and all that for the first time since 1974. The kicker? If you want to see it, you’re going to have to be in the very southern tip of Australia, New
Experts think they might have found the oldest-ever Greek copy of The Odyssey, the epic poem by Homer which is widely regarded as one of the most significant works of literature ever put down on paper… or rather clay. An ancient slab of stone thought to date back to the 3rd century CE looks to
The discovery of some rather large dinosaur bones in Argentina has got scientists wondering whether the creatures may have grown to their biggest sizes earlier in history than we previously thought. This trend towards gigantism or above average growth in sauropodomorphs – the biggest dinosaurs and indeed the biggest land animals in history – marks
Not many of us can lay claim to being Nobel-Prize-winning theoretical physicists, but even if we’re not Albert Einstein, we can still visualise ourselves in the great scientist’s shoes. If we can do that, surprising things might happen. A new study by scientists in Spain showed that when people assumed Einstein’s physical identity as part
Last year, scientists announced the discovery of an exoplanet just 11 light-years (3.37 parsecs) from Earth. Not just any exoplanet – a rocky one, that looks like it might just be habitable. Now another team has taken a closer look, and found evidence that bolsters that supposition. The planet is Ross 128 b, orbiting a
If you’re struggling through a course in Calculus 101 in your tertiary degree right now, wishing you’d paid attention in high school, we’ve got some good news: it probably wouldn’t have helped. A study of more than 6,200 freshmen at 133 colleges and universities across the US has found you’d have been better off mastering
For weeks, the UK has been gripped by a punishing, record-breaking heatwave. While conditions on the ground may be unprecedented, what’s happening underneath it comes as an even bigger shock. Aerial archaeologists combing the wilted Welsh countryside have discovered a transforming landscape revealing a forgotten legacy of ancient monuments – a faded map of centuries-old
Physicists from Eötvös University in Budapest and the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle have taken an innovative approach to determining when the first organic chemicals formed, and it turns out they could be a lot older than we imagined. Complex organic chemistry once considered unique to life might not only be ubiquitous throughout the
Zebra stripes do not help regulate their body temperature. That’s the conclusion reached by researchers in Hungary, trying to narrow down a longstanding mystery about the animals’ amazing coats. Zebras are magnificent animals, with the tall stature and long faces shared with their horse family (equid) cousins. Unlike equids, though, they’re dazzlingly striped black and
Following a nearly decade-long hunt, a massive saltwater crocodile has been captured in northern Australia, according to wildlife authorities. Rangers caught the crocodile Monday after setting a trap on a private property near Katherine, a town in Northern Territory, Australia. The evasive crocodile is said to be one of the largest trapped in the region,
The 12 boys and their soccer coach who spent more than two weeks trapped in the Tham Luang cave system in Thailand have all been safely rescued from the cave, but their ordeal isn’t over yet. The boys will be monitored while in isolation for at least a week at a hospital in Chiang Rai, according
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