A vibrant pinkish-coloured seaweed that grows in temperate tropical waters could end up being a huge aid in reducing greenhouse gases, if scientists in Australia have their way. Researchers are currently looking into ways to sustainably mass-produce the crimson-hued algae – called Asparagopsis taxiformis – after a study five years ago demonstrated it almost completely
NASA’s 10-year plan involves billions of dollars and spans millions of miles. And much like the universe, it’s only expanding. Last year, the agency announced that it’s planning to send astronauts back to the Moon and eventually build a base there, with a Mars-bound mission to follow in the years after that. In June, the
High in the Himalayas of India, amid the snow-capped peaks, nestles a mystery. Roopkund Lake is a shallow body of water filled with human bones – the skeletons of hundreds of individuals. It’s these that give the lake its other name, Skeleton Lake, and no one knows how the remains came to be there. One
Scientists have discovered evidence of a massive distributed reservoir of methane formed by chemical reactions deep inside the ocean floor. Abiotic methane – created in reactions that don’t involve organic matter or living creatures – has long been known to exist buried in the seabed and released via deep-sea vents, but the origins of the
Deep in western Russia, if you know where to look, you’ll find a small collection of ragged scrap metal and crumbled concrete. Which isn’t that exciting. But if you rifle through the rubble, you will find a large metal disc bolted to the ground. This isn’t just any old disc – it’s the welded-shut cap
India’s Chandrayaan 2 spacecraft is now in orbit around the Moon. That means it’s on schedule to touch down on the lunar surface on September 7, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP). If the mission continues as planned, India will become the fourth country to land a spacecraft on the Moon, following Russia, the US, and China
When it comes to harnessing renewable wind energy, the European Union is not even close to reaching its full potential, according to a new study. If a wind turbine was placed on every suitable spot of land, research shows it could provide more than 100 times the wind energy currently produced on shore. Calculated at
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped foot on the Moon in 1969, they helped to cement the idea of a “moonshot” – a goal or achievement that challenges what we thought was possible. While few moonshots measure up to the Apollo program, many of the world’s greatest inventions were once thought of as similarly
It’s one of the deepest unknowns in geophysics: the hidden movements of Earth’s innermost core. While we think of the ground beneath our feet as terra firma, that reassuring rigidity only extends so far. Deep below the planet’s surface, Earth’s super-hot inner core sits within a molten liquid outer core, detached from the overlying mantle
The Universe is expanding, and that expansion is speeding up over time. These two facts have been well established through observation, but we don’t know what’s causing that expansion. It seems to be some mysterious, unknown energy that acts like the opposite of gravity. We call this hypothetical energy “dark energy“, and it’s been calculated
A dramatically changing climate is going to have a lot of negative side effects we didn’t predict, and scientists have just found a new one: really cranky spiders. A heating climate may or may not increase the frequency of tropical storms, but it probably will make them more intense. Scientists are also predicting an increase
Scientists in the US have flown directly through an exceedingly rare atmospheric phenomenon known as a ‘fire cloud’ – and they captured the unique, “otherworldly” moment on camera. Researchers with NASA and the NOAA were investigating smoke produced by the Williams Flats wildfire in Washington when they seized the opportunity to fly inside the rare
Death came swiftly for Aldo Machado’s honey bees. Less than 48 hours after the first Apis mellifera showed signs of sickness, tens of thousands lay dead, their bodies piled in mounds. “As soon as the healthy bees began clearing the dying bees out of the hives, they became contaminated,” said Machado, vice president of Brazil’s Rio
Scientists may have been looking for extraterrestrial life in all the wrong places. Astronomers may have just ruled out life on an entire class of exoplanets. The research, published Monday in the journal Nature, looked specifically at the exoplanet LHS 3844b – a small, rocky planet orbiting a star similar to our Sun. The study
Researchers have developed an electronics heat shield just 10 atoms thick, a shield that has the potential to make our gadgets both safer to use and more compact in the future. Heat and electronics don’t mix well, which is why you might find your laptop shutting down in protest if you use it in the
Plastic pollution has reached the Antarctic wilderness. It’s at Earth’s highest peak, and its deepest chasm. And yet, the extent of this insidious plague can still take us by surprise. According to new research, plastic has now turned up camouflaged as ordinary pebbles. These small chunks of plastic – called pyroplastics – are created when
Between its raging heat and intense gravity, the region really close to the Sun is a pretty hazardous place. And that has been spectacularly demonstrated in a new video of a comet, like the legendary Icarus, falling to its doom when it veered a little too close. The comet’s death dive was captured by the
Early Earth grew up in a chaotic time. As our planet tried to find its place in a relatively young Solar System about 4.5 billion years ago, it was under constant attack from waves of comets, whizzing asteroids, and even some failed proto-planets. The Late Heavy Bombardment period was the absolute zenith of all this
Our galaxy could be littered with warm, watery planets like Earth. That’s the conclusion of researchers at Penn State University, who used data from NASA’s Kepler telescope to estimate the number of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way. Their results, published in The Astronomical Journal this week, suggest that an Earth-like planet orbits one in
The eerie, hellish glow coming from the Moon may seem unreal in this image, since it’s invisible to our eyes. But instruments that detect gamma rays tell us it’s real. More than just a grainy, red picture, it’s a vivid reminder that there’s more going on than meets human eyes. It’s also a reminder that
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, still wants to drop nuclear bombs on Mars to transform it into a livable planet for humans — as evidenced by his latest tweet on Friday morning. Nuke Mars! — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 16, 2019 Musk believes that by hitting Mars with nuclear weapons, the planet’s polar
People around the world may be worried about nuclear tensions rising, but I think they’re missing the fact that a major cyberattack could be just as damaging – and hackers are already laying the groundwork. With the US and Russia pulling out of a key nuclear weapons pact – and beginning to develop new nuclear
The self-declared daredevil and Flat Earther “Mad” Mike Hughes is preparing for another launch in his homemade, steam-powered rocket in the Californian desert. His final goal is to reach the edge of space, but how likely is he to succeed and see that the Earth is actually spherical? Hughes’ first rocket launch was in 2014,
For quantum computing to become fully realised, we’re going to have to make a few huge scientific leaps along the way – including finding a superconductor that can act in the same way as silicon does in today’s computing. A team of researchers thinks that search might now be over. Introducing the compound uranium ditelluride
It looks like we’ve bagged another win for gravitational wave astronomy. A new gravitational wave detection is the best candidate yet for a type of cosmic collision never seen – the elusive merger between a black hole and a neutron star. The event, called S190814bv, was detected by the LIGO and Virgo interferometers at 11
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosetta mission spent two years at the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. At the end of September 2016, its mission was ended when the spacecraft was sent on a collision course into the comet. During its time at comet 67P, it captured a vast amount of images. The ESA made all those images freely available at
In its new special report on climate change and land, the IPCC calls for more effective and sustainable land management, and more sustainable food consumption. But who is the onus on to go vegetarian, or look after land better? You, me, the “global elite”? The world’s poorest people, or perhaps the many millions of newly-wealthy
Carbon can be arranged in a number of configurations. When each of its atoms is bonded to three other carbon atoms, it’s relatively soft graphite. Add just one more bond and it becomes one of the hardest minerals known, diamond. Chuck 60 carbon atoms together in a soccerball shape and boom, buckyballs. But a ring
In July, the French daily newspaper Le Monde reported that the 0.6-mile (1 kilometre) solar road was a fiasco. In December 2016, when the trial road was unveiled, the French Ministry of the Environment called it “unprecedented”. French officials said the road, made of photovoltaic panels, would generate electricity to power streetlights in Tourouvre, a
The illustrious Hubble Space Telescope has captured two passing galaxies making contact for the first time. Known as UGC 2369, the featured duo is fated to one day merge and become a single galaxy. But for now, the two galaxies are just getting to know each other. In the image below, the pair can be seen
Data from thousands of surface monitoring stations worldwide, including ocean buoys in the Pacific and land-based thermometers dotting the continents, show that July 2019 was the warmest month on Earth since at least 1850. Berkeley Earth, an independent climate monitoring and research organization, released data Thursday showing last month beat August 2016 for the title
Climate deniers are often featured by the mainstream media as a way to ‘balance’ their reporting, and yet for most of this century, climate coverage has been neither fair nor balanced. Since the early 2000s, scientific dispute over the reality of human-caused climate change has virtually come to an end. But you wouldn’t necessarily know
Greenland is known for its glaciers, but in the past month, the island has shed ice and taken on fire. Scientists didn’t expect to see Greenland melt at this rate for another 50 years: By the last week of July, the melting had reached levels that climate models projected for 2070 in the most pessimistic
Something weird can happen to the ears of people who hang out in the icy cold of the ocean’s embrace. Small spurs of bone start growing in the ear canals, triggered by the irritation the cold temperatures cause on the inner ear. It’s a condition seen a lot in surfers, so it’s known as surfer’s
A careful inspection of super-deep diamonds has revealed what geologists have long suspected: Hiding somewhere in our planet’s interior, there exists a vast reservoir of primordial magma, undisturbed for more than 4 billion years. The location, the size and the contents of this ancient reservoir are still up for debate, but thanks to these diamonds,
While a team of researchers from the US Geological Survey (USGS) was analysing rainwater samples for nitrogen pollution, they found something they weren’t expecting – plastic. In a new report, aptly titled “It is raining plastic”, the team explain that plastics were identified in over 90 percent of the rainwater samples they took at eight different
Ah, New Zealand. The ancient home of enormous parrots. And, apparently, penguins that would tower menacingly over them. Researchers have found the remains of a beast that would have stood nearly as tall as a human, one of the biggest penguins to ever waddle the Earth. Paleontologists have named the penguin Crossvallia waiparensis, and it
Jupiter’s core is a bizarre mix of solid rocks mixed with a diffuse bubble of hydrogen gas. And the story of how it got that way has long eluded explanation. But now scientists think they’re on to something, suggesting that the gas giant absorbed another protoplanet during a head-on collision some 4.5 billion years ago
Jupiter’s core is a bizarre mix of solid rocks mixed with a diffuse bubble of hydrogen gas. And the story of how it got that way has long eluded explanation. But now scientists think they’re on to something, suggesting that the gas giant absorbed another protoplanet during a head-on collision some 4.5 billion years ago
Around 54 million years ago, in the early Eocene, there lived a tiny crane fly. It may not have been a particularly remarkable crane fly while it was alive, but after it died, geological processes turned it into something magnificent: a fossil so brilliantly preserved, we can make out the individual cells of its compound
Human semen, If you separated it out, would on average hold a 50/50 mix of sex chromosomes – half of the sperm bearing the Y chromosome, and half the X chromosome. Despite all the myths about choosing the sex of your baby through superstitious rituals, there’s not a lot we can do about changing those odds. And
One of the biggest mysteries out there in the Universe is inching closer to answers. An astonishing eight new repeating radio signals known as fast radio bursts (FRBs) have been detected flaring from deep space. At the start of 2019, just one of these mysterious signals, FRB 121102, was known to flash repeatedly. In January,
After reports emerged that contractors had reviewed voice recordings for Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant, all three companies moved to change their policies. Although customers theoretically have the final word over their digital assistants, they’re not given the option of blocking the recordings outright. The companies say the data is collected and reviewed
Facebook has been clandestinely accumulating written transcriptions of its users’ conversations, which the social media giant recorded through their phone microphones. That’s according to third-party contractors who spoke to Bloomberg about the practice. The contractors said that they were paid to listen in on countless, occasional vulgar conversations among Facebook Messenger users, though the company
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 80 billion or so neurons are also incredibly fragile. If
When scientists ran DNA analysis on a sediment core taken from the floor of the Arctic ocean back in 2010, they found something surprising. A previously unknown organism belonging to the strange domain of microbes called Archaea appeared to have genomic characteristics associated with a totally different domain – Eukaryota. They named their discovery Lokiarchaeota,
There have been plenty of claims about what being left-handed means, and whether it changes the type of person someone is – but the truth is something of an enigma. Myths about handedness appear year after year, but researchers have yet to uncover all of what it means to be left-handed. So why are people
You may have heard the tired argument that if carbon dioxide levels are going up, it’s going to be great for boosting the growth of trees. It’s true – to an extent. But there’s a really important detail we must not miss. Plants, including trees, are growing faster thanks to what is known as the
- 1
- 2
- 3
- …
- 62
- Next Page »