Archaeologists in hard hats and face masks carefully remove earth from around enormous bones at the site of Mexico City’s new airport, where construction work has uncovered a huge trove of mammoth skeletons. The remains of dozens of the extinct giants and other prehistoric creatures have been found in Zumpango on the northern edge of
Microgravity is pretty rough on us ground-dwellers – with bodies no longer constantly acting against gravity, muscle mass and bone density withers away. Even with two hours of exercise daily, it can take months for astronauts to recover their muscle density after a six-month stint on the International Space Station. Bone density can take years
Trees that grow quickly die younger, risking a release of carbon dioxide that challenges forecasts that forests will continue to be a “sink” for planet-warming emissions, scientists said Tuesday. Tree cover absorbs a significant proportion of carbon dioxide emitted by burning fossil fuels and plays a crucial role in projections for our ability to wrestle
In a comprehensive search of a patch of the Southern sky, not even a hint of alien technology has been detected at low radio frequencies. Across at least 10 million stars that populate the Vela region – the deepest and widest survey for extraterrestrial intelligence yet – the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Australia found
Living at higher altitudes in the US may shape your psychology in strange ways, a new study reveals, showing a distinct link between living in elevated, mountainous regions and certain personality traits. Not only that, but the kinds of traits mountain-dwellers demonstrate are quite specific, researchers say, rooted in the pioneer history of the Old
An unusual cache of at least 13 wooden coffins dating back to 2,500 years ago has been discovered in the desert necropolis of Saqqara in Egypt. What makes these coffins so special among the thousands interred in the tomb complex is the fact they have remained intact for millennia, and are still completely sealed –
“Zombie” wildfires that were smoldering beneath the Arctic ice all winter suddenly flared to life this summer when the snow and ice above it melted, new monitoring data reveal. And this year has been the worst for Arctic wildfires on record, since reliable monitoring began 17 years ago. Arctic fires this summer released as much carbon in the first
A growing body of drug research has shown that experiences with psychedelic drugs can be both positive and negative – scary and uncomfortable for some, but leading to improvements in well-being and relationships for others. These substances also show promising early results for treating mental disorders, in controlled doses. So why the disparity between the
To the innocent eyes of animals, the appearance of humans on the horizon represents more of an existential threat than the vast environmental upheaval of previous climate change up until now, new research suggests. According to a new study, mammal extinctions tracing back as far as 126,000 years ago have had more to do with
The moons of Mars are not quite like our Earth’s Moon. Phobos, the larger of the two, is much closer to its planet; compared to the Moon’s 27-day orbit, Phobos swings around Mars in line with the planet’s equator thrice every Martian day (sol). Solar eclipses, therefore, are much more frequent than those here on
It often seems impossible to know what’s going on in Fido’s head as he lounges on his dog bed. But a handful of new studies offer surprising insights about how our canine companions age, perceive human speech, and find their way home. A study published last month showed that dogs understand verbal communication just like we
A little baby horse named Kurt is a symbol of renewed hope for the survival of his kind. Born on 6 August 2020, he is the world’s first ever successfully cloned Przewalski’s horse, an endangered wild horse native to the steppes of central Asia. What makes Kurt even more exciting is that he was cloned
The Chinese government has announced a first – they have successfully landed a reusable spacecraft safely back on Earth after it spent two days in orbit. The spacecraft – called Chongfu Shiyong Shiyan Hangtian Qi (CSSHQ) – was launched September 4 on a Long March-2F carrier from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northwest China. It
How do you study something invisible? This is a challenge that faces astronomers who study dark matter. Although dark matter comprises 85 percent of all matter in the Universe, it doesn’t interact with light. It can only be seen through the gravitational influence it has on light and other matter. To make matters worse, efforts
Two hundred ancient mammoth skeletons have been discovered beneath an airport construction site north of Mexico City – the largest collection of mammoth bones ever found. Archaeologists at Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History first realised the area might hide mammoth remains after they found two human-dug mammoth traps in November as part of
If you’re a Star Trek fan, you may think the above image portrays the “Nexus” from the movie Star Trek: Generations. In the film, the Nexus was a ribbon-like extra-dimensional realm that exists outside of normal space-time. But this is actually a real image from the venerable Hubble Space Telescope, of the Cygnus Loop. This stunning picture from
All around the world, people honour their dead in myriad ways. In Vietnam, families burn cash, clothes, shoes, even luxury items, all made from paper to bid their loved ones well in the afterlife. In India, mourners carry bodies wrapped in coloured cloths to the banks of the River Ganges where they are cremated on
Our natural inclination to help others in need runs extremely deep within our mammalian heritage – there’s many examples of altruism in primates and it’s even been demonstrated in mice. This generosity, prevalent across human cultures, has psychological and health benefits for us all as individuals. Now researchers have also found evidence that generosity helps people in societies live
Imagine you could throw the perfect bullseye, but you’d have to wear glasses to do it. That’s a trade-off some space travellers may unwittingly make when they venture off the planet. A study published Friday examined the brains of eight male Russian cosmonauts roughly seven months after they returned from lengthy missions to the International
Hearing loss in humans can make life challenging in our hustle-bustle landscape. But when your world is literally as silent as a grave, being hard of hearing just might be something of a superpower. For naked mole rats and their cousins, the loss of genes that would usually amplify noises is another extraordinary adaptation in
Humans wouldn’t survive two minutes in space, but in 2007, two species of tardigrades were released into space and then collected again – still alive. Tardigrades are a group of tiny invertebrate species that live all over the world – you can probably find one yourself on a piece of moss in your back garden
Scientists have unveiled a new printing process that can turn just about any piece of paper or cardboard into a waterproof keyboard that you can fold up and put in your pocket – and it doesn’t require a power source. The tech makes use of a special coating that’s repellent to liquids and dust, which allows
The laws that govern the use of tear gas are downright illogical, argue human rights advocates. The very same “riot control agents” recently deployed against citizens in Hong Kong, the United States, Chile, Turkey, Nepal, Greece, France, India, Lebanon and South Africa (not to mention many more) have been banned from international warfare under the
SpaceX says early tests of its rapidly growing fleet of internet-providing satellites are yielding promising results. Internal tests of a beta version of internet service from the company’s Starlink project show “super low latency and download speeds greater than 100” megabits per second, Kate Tice, a SpaceX senior certification engineer, said during a live broadcast
You’d think a plant scientist would feel at home on a farm, but Neil Stewart was used to working with potatoes, not human cadavers. Fascinated by environmental contaminants, Stewart was on tour at the University of Tennessee’s ‘body farm’ – more formally known as the Anthropology Research Facility – where forensic anthropologists study the effects
Modern-day drone sensors can sometimes detect what’s invisible to the human eye, such as the remains of a historical city called Etzanoa or the ‘Great Settlement’ in the fields of Wichita, Kansas – remains that have been buried for hundreds of years. Researchers think they’ve found what’s known as a ‘council circle’ monument in Etzanoa, and while
One of the most powerful solar observatories in the world has just completed a major upgrade. And now, the GREGOR solar telescope in Spain has taken some of the most high-resolution images of our Sun ever obtained in Europe. In the upgraded telescope’s new images, details as small as 50 kilometres (31 miles) across can
A shark with teeth as big as your hand has to be huge. But when teeth are all you have to go on, you’ll need to think outside the box to work out what the rest of the long-extinct monster looked like. It turns out the pelagic terror referred to as Megalodon might have looked
A cloud of dust and gas swirling around an infant star system 1,300 light-years away is like no planet-forming disc we’ve seen yet. It consists of three rings, wrapped around three stars – and all three rings have different orientations, with the innermost wildly misaligned from the other two. It’s the first direct evidence that
While mighty oaks do fall, there are a rare few that can stand for nearly a millennium, even under harsh conditions. Radiocarbon dating has now revealed the oldest temperate hardwood tree in the world sits atop a steep rocky slope in a remote mountain belt of the Mediterranean. Here, on this rocky precipice in Italy, lives
While filming herself getting ready for work recently, TikTok user @gracie.ham reached deep into the ancient foundations of mathematics and found an absolute gem of a question: “How could someone come up with a concept like algebra?” She also asked what the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras might have used mathematics for, and other questions that
The Moon is both seductively close to Earth and cosmically far away: Decades after the end of the space race, it remains extraordinarily expensive and difficult to actually get there. The journey just got a bit easier, however, thanks to a freshly published NASA invention. The agency’s patent doesn’t cover a new piece of equipment
The Moon, our closest cosmic neighbour, and the only other body in the Solar System on which humans have set foot, is fairly well known to us. We know that there is practically no air. We know that there is water ice, but no liquid water. So you can understand why the detection of haematite
A tiny bit of air always leaks from the International Space Station – but not quite as much as is leaking now. Officials first noticed a leak last September, but they didn’t do anything about it for nearly a year, since the leak wasn’t major. Plus, station operations like space walks and crew exchanges kept
The physical footprints left behind by humankind don’t wash away with the waves. Human construction has modified the oceans as much as it has urbanised the land, a new analysis reveals. Mapping the global extent of human development in Earth’s oceans, an international team calculated the footprint occupied by human built structures as of 2018,
It’s like something out of Stranger Things, but with fewer Demogorgons and less of the sinister darkness: physicists have flipped reality on its head, creating their own ‘upside down’ by getting small boats to float underneath a levitating liquid. Seeing it in action, you would think you were watching some kind of sci-fi movie effect,
From 7 billion light-years away, a pair of colliding black holes has delivered up, on a shiny gravitational wave platter, one of the most sought-after detections in black hole astronomy – the extremely elusive ‘middleweight’ black hole, which lies in between stellar-mass black holes and supermassive behemoths. Not only, however, did the two colliding black
With all sorts of rocks flying around willy-nilly in the space around Earth, telescopes around the world are keeping a careful eye on the sky to make sure we’re not in any danger. So when the University of Arizona’s Catalina Sky Survey and the University of Hawaii’s Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System spotted what seemed
When an earthquake struck the Italian mountain town of L’Aquila in April 2009, few people would have been thinking that carbon dioxide had anything to do with it. But geologists were on the case straight away. Immediately after the L’Aquila earthquake, a team from the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology started measuring the
Several years ago, a remotely operated vehicle was descending down into a freshwater cave system, hidden deep under the Czech Republic, when it came to an abrupt end. Not the end of the cave, that is, but the end of its cable. Now, new estimates taken from up at the surface suggest we’d need more
A bubble of methane gas, swelling beneath Siberia’s melting permafrost for who knows how long, has burst open to form an impressive 50-metre-deep (164-foot-deep) crater. The giant hole was first spotted by a TV crew flying overhead, and, according to The Siberian Times, when scientists went to investigate, they found chunks of ice and rock thrown hundreds
In the hot sunshine, asphalt road and roof coverings can put out more secondary organic aerosol (SOA) pollutants than the cars on the road, according to a new study that looked at the South Coast Air Basin in California. Cars still produce more overall pollution, but SOAs – such as the ones emitted by hot
Earth, with its reassuringly familiar continents, arranged in the dependable configuration you know and love, didn’t always look the way it does now. Its land masses, once locked together in supercontinents, have cracked and broken and slid away from each other, and repeatedly come together again over the course of our planet’s 4.5-billion-year history. In
The volume of lakes formed as glaciers worldwide melt due to climate change had jumped by 50 percent in 30 years, according to new study based on satellite data. “We have known that not all meltwater is making it into the oceans immediately,” lead author Dan Shugar, a geomorphologist and associate professor at the University
When searching for signs of life in the Universe, we tend to look for very specific things, based on what we know: a planet like Earth, in orbit around a star, and at a distance that allows liquid surface water. But there could, conceivably, be other forms of life out there that look like nothing
There is no doubt that Australia’s Black Summer last year was absolutely devastating. Fires across the country burnt through 186,000 square kilometres (72,000 square miles) of land, killing 34 people, while billions of animals were affected. But there’s something particularly chilling about seeing the end results of the blaze. Australian aerial analysis company Geospatial Intelligence
The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which hold enough frozen water to lift oceans 65 metres, are tracking the UN’s worst-case scenarios for sea level rise, researchers said Monday, highlighting flaws in current climate change models. Mass loss from 2007 to 2017 due to melt-water and crumbling ice aligned almost perfectly with the Intergovernmental Panel
In October 1961, the Soviet Union dropped the most powerful nuclear bomb in history over a remote island north of the Arctic Circle. Though the bomb detonated nearly 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) above ground, the resulting shockwave stripped the island as bare and flat as a skating rink. Onlookers saw the flash more than 600 miles
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