A science teacher from a remote village in Kenya has won a US$1 million global prize recognising and celebrating the impact and importance of the world’s best educators. Peter Tabichi, a maths and physics teacher from Kenya’s famine-prone Rift Valley, was selected out of 10,000 teachers from almost 180 countries to win the Varkey Foundation
The Great Red Spot, a storm larger than the Earth and powerful enough to tear apart smaller storms that get drawn into it, is one of the most recognizable features in Jupiter’s atmosphere and the entire solar system. The counterclockwise-moving storm, an anticyclone, boasts wind speeds as high as 300 miles (500 kilometres) per hour.
A house proud mouse, considerately tidying up the workbench of the shed in which it lives, has been captured on video and shared online. The mouse pops out of a box, picks up some screws, nail clippers and a metal chain and carries them back into the box. It’s tempting to think the mouse is
The founder of MoviePass is back, and this time he’s not messing around. MoviePass co-founder Stacy Spikes has a new startup called PreShow, and it’s using a business model straight out of A Clockwork Orange: The company’s new app helps you score free movie tickets — as long as you sit through 15 to 20
Mount Everest’s glaciers are melting – and the remnants buried for decades below the surface are beginning to reemerge. Most alarming, expedition operators are starting to find the dead bodies of climbers who attempted to scale the mountain. Hundreds of people have died while attempting to climb the mountain since the 1990s, and the majority
Kalashnikov’s AK-47 represents a timeless design and an instantly recognisable icon of warfare, but one thing it cannot do is fly. But Russian arms maker Almaz-Antey Business Insider, 2018 on what looks like a literal flying AK-47 drone. Images filed with the patent show a minimalist drone formed around a Kalashnikov-style rifle, and were Business
Roughly 12,800 years ago, planet Earth went through a brief cold snap that was unrelated to any ice age. For years, there have been geologists that have argued that this period was caused by an airburst or meteor fragments (known as the Younger Dryas Impact Theory). This event is believed to have caused widespread destruction
After decades of research, an analysis of light has finally identified the age of an ancient star cluster in the Milky Way. It’s called HP 1, and it’s roughly 12.8 billion years old. That makes it one of the oldest ever found – not just in the galaxy, but in the entire Universe. HP 1
A spectacular discovery in south China is shedding more light on the mysterious lifeforms that crawled our planet half a billion years ago. In a shale bed next to Danshui River, palaentologists have excavated around 30,000 fossils dating back to the Cambrian period 518 million years ago. The newly discovered exquisite fossil bed, what is
For a while now, scientists have been debating what to do with one of the most famous tools used to describe scientific certainty, the concept of ‘statistical significance’. Some think it’s fine as is. Others want to make it smaller, while yet others argue in favour of ditching it altogether. Assuming we did bite the
We know what you’re thinking: why am I looking at a weird handful of pink marbles in a patch of mud? Because it’s a lot cooler than that. Although these little see-through balls really do seem to be marbles upon first glance, they’re actually the eggs of a legless amphibian that belongs to the Chikilidae
Why do we exist? This is arguably the most profound question there is and one that may seem completely outside the scope of particle physics. But our new experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has taken us a step closer to figuring it out. To understand why, let’s go back in time some 13.8 billion
As we humans grow older and wiser, it’s not unusual to feel as if time were whizzing by, quietly gathering speed with every year. Mechanical engineer Adrian Bejan from Duke University now thinks he has figured out why, and just like ageing, he suspects the experience is both universal and inescapable. Adhering to the physical laws
It all looked so promising. Ten years ago, a survey of mother humpbacks and their calves showed their numbers were on the up off the coast of Maui, Hawaii. Something has changed, with encounters plummeting by three quarters since 2013. Of course, there could be a number of reasons behind the apparent decline in whale
It’s an unthinkable ecological nightmare: the scientific prediction that up to 40 percent of the world’s insect species face extinction in the next few decades. This grim tomorrow, forecast in a widely publicised study published last month, threatens to destroy the food web as we know it. But only if the insect apocalypse is as
Of all the different dark matter detectors in the world, only one has consistently come up with a positive signal. The results of DAMA experiment in Italy are hotly debated – and now two experiments seeking to verify it using the same materials have returned conflicting results. ANAIS, a dark matter detector run by the
The hot, dry hillsides of Southern California are normally covered in drab desert scrub. But some of them harbour a colourful secret: millions of flowers that wait for the perfect conditions to bloom. Over the past month, the just-right combination of ample rain from December and stable cooler temperatures arrived in Walker Canyon, which is
Spring officially begins in the Northern Hemisphere early Wednesday evening at 5:58 pm Eastern (9:58 pm UTC). Less than four hours after the onset of the new season, a stunning spring supermoon will be full in the night sky. The third and final supermoon of 2019, it reaches 100 percent fullness at 9:43 pm Eastern.
Last November, a huge seismic event that shook the planet left experts wondering about its possible source. Researchers now think they know what might have caused it: an offshore volcanic event unlike any other in recorded history. If the hypothesis is right, and there has been a massive movement of magma underneath the sea floor,
Many stars sedately tread the measure of the galaxies they inhabit, slowly orbiting the galactic core. Not a star called PSR J0002+6216, though. PSR J0002+6216, astronomers have discovered, is rocketing through the Milky Way at absolutely breakneck speeds. To be precise, it’s travelling at 1,130 kilometres per second (700 miles per second). That could take
The type of rocks you live near could greatly affect how much your area could be damaged by massive solar flares in future, a study has found. Usually all eyes are on the Sun in anticipation of a serious solar storm that threatens to incinerate delicate technology across the globe. Some are looking the other
In the Gulf of California, an innocent, once-flourishing animal is on the verge of disappearing from the world forever: a victim of nets, and the humans who lay them. The vaquita, the world’s smallest and most endangered cetacean, is almost gone. Last week, scientists announced only about 10 of these porpoises are left in the
A shock discovery is in from Bennu. The NASA spacecraft analysing the asteroid has observed it shooting out plumes of dust that surround it in a dusty haze – a phenomenon we’ve never seen in an asteroid before. In the months that OSIRIS-REx has been studying Bennu, the spacecraft has observed this ejecta no fewer
It’s been a weird month of sunfish showing up in unexpected places. Take, for instance, this impressive sunfish that was found at the mouth of the Murray River in South Australia last weekend. Local Linette Grzelak uploaded a photo to Facebook, which shows off the creature’s truly impressive size. (Ralph Foster/iNaturalist/CC BY-NC 4.0) Although massive,
For the first time, a woman has been awarded the prestigious Abel Prize. Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck of the University of Texas at Austin will receive the annual prize for her tremendous contributions to the field. “The recognition of Uhlenbeck’s achievements should have been far greater, for her work has led to some of the most
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) say they’ve found a way to levitate and propel objects using only light – though, for the time being, the work remains theoretical. They hope the technique could be used for “trajectory control of ultra-light spacecraft and even laser-propelled light sails for space exploration,” according to a
In quantum physics, particles can ‘tunnel’ through seemingly impenetrable barriers, even when they apparently don’t have the energy to do so. Now, researchers have gleaned behind the curtain to better understand how this trick is done. This problem has puzzled scientists for decades – in particular, the time it takes for particles to do their
Nobody ever said having a brother was easy, but for girls who start life by sharing a womb with a male twin, the consequences can be drastically life-altering, scientists say. According to the largest study of its kind, women who share their mother’s womb with a twin brother end up being less likely to graduate
A chemical reaction you learned about in middle school could help solve the energy crisis. Running an electrical current through water splits it into oxygen and hydrogen, the latter of which can be used as a reliable, zero-emission fuel source. In the past, the process of purifying water beforehand was too energy intensive for this
Astronomers have just found 83 quasars, powered by supermassive black holes and dating back to the infancy of the Universe, when it was less than 10 percent of its current age. This discovery reveals that such objects were more common at the dawn of time than we thought, and challenges our entire cosmological model. Quasars
Halfway between the east coast of Africa and Madagascar lies the remote island of Anjouan – a volcanic landmass born in ancient eruptions some four million years ago. Because of Anjouan’s fiery origins, the entire island should be uniformly composed of volcanic basalt: a dark-coloured, lava-derived rock. Should be. But isn’t. For over a century,
A few months ago, on 18 December 2018, a massive airburst in the skies above Earth exploded with the equivalent of 173 kilotons of TNT. That’s over 10 times the amount released by the Hiroshima bombing (15 kilotons), and the third largest meteor explosion in over 100 years, coming in behind the 2013 Chelyabinsk explosion
Do human beings have a magnetic sense? Biologists know other animals do. They think it helps creatures including bees, turtles and birds navigate through the world. Scientists have tried to investigate whether humans belong on the list of magnetically sensitive organisms. For decades, there’s been a back-and-forth between positive reports and failures to demonstrate the
By the time marine biologist Darrell Blatchley arrived at the fishing village Saturday, the young Cuvier’s beaked whale was already floating, dead in the water, its eyes sunken and ribs protruding through its skin. The current off the southern Philippine island of Mindanao had washed away the blood it vomited before its death. He already
Hidden in the evergreen forests of Guinea and Liberia, scientists have discovered a new species of snake that can deliver a venomous stab all without even opening its mouth. It’s an unusual skill that belongs solely to stiletto snakes, which have long fangs they can stick in and out of the corners of their mouths,
How exactly do our brains sort between the five taste groups: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami? We’ve now got a much better idea, thanks to research that has pinned down where in the brain this taste processing happens. Step forward: the insular cortex. Already thought to be responsible for everything from motor control to
As the frozen Antarctic landscape at the bottom of the world adjusts to an ever hotter planet, we keep finding more mysterious phenomena beneath and within the ice. Now, there are “ice quakes” to add to that list. It wasn’t all so long ago that earthquakes were thought to not exist on this unforgiving continent.
Jak Wilmot, the co-founder of Atlanta-based VR content studioDisrupt VR, spent 168 consecutive hours in a VR headset – that’s a full week – pent up in his apartment. “This is quite possibly the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, but welcome to a week in the future,” he said in a video about the experiment.
We often think of Venus as our closest Solar System sibling. It’s the most similar to Earth in size, mass and composition. And we thought it was the closest in terms of physical distance – but it looks like that honour could belong to Mercury. No, the order of the planetary orbits is still the
A sunken ship found in the Nile river may have lain undisturbed for over 2,500 years, but now it is finally ponying up its secrets. Scientists think that this ship has revealed a structure whose existence has been debated for centuries. In fragment 2.96 of Herodotus’ Histories, published around 450 BCE, the Ancient Greek historian –
The phrase “mass extinction” typically conjures images of the asteroid crash that led to the twilight of the dinosaurs. Upon impact, that 6-mile-wide space rock caused a tsunami in the Atlantic Ocean, along with earthquakes and landslides up and down what is now the Americas. A heat pulse baked the Earth, and the Tyrannosaurus rex
Tests show that dormant herpes viruses reactivate in more than half the astronauts who travel on the Space Shuttle and International Space station, according to new NASA research – a phenomenon the space agency says could pose problems for deep space missions. “During spaceflight there is a rise in secretion of stress hormones like cortisol
Every once in a while, the Milky Way ejects a star. The evicted star is typically ejected from the chaotic area at the center of the Galaxy, where our Super Massive Black Hole (SMBH) lives. But at least one of them was ejected from the comparatively calm galactic disk, a discovery that has astronomers rethinking this whole star ejection
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, which launched in 2016, just sent back some spectacular images of the Martian surface. The orbiter is equipped to take images of the Martian surface in glorious 3D. The picture above might look like some kind of hairy structure, but it’s actually a false-colour image of
Birth order, according to conventional wisdom, molds personality: Firstborn children, secure with their place in the family and expected to be the mature ones, grow up to be intellectual, responsible and conformist. Younger siblings work harder to get their parents’ attention, take more risks and become creative rebels. That’s the central idea in psychologist Frank
By combining math with 3D printing, researchers from Boston University have created a new material that seemingly defies logic: light and air have no trouble passing through it — but sound cannot. “The idea is that we can now mathematically design an object that can block the sounds of anything,” researcher Xin Zhang said in
Returning to Earth from the International Space Station, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield remarked how making the right decision is vital in high pressure environments, saying: Most of the time, you only really get one try to do most of the critical stuff and the consequences are life or death. Mankind is preparing for a new
The last three ice ages might have been triggered by tectonic collisions between Earth’s continents, according to new research, and it could give us clues as to how the planet’s climate might suddenly shift again in the future. What’s likely to have happened, the new study says, is these massive collisions pushed oceanic rocks up
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