We all know that corvids (ravens and crows) are no bird brains. Earlier this year, they stunned scientists with their ability to tear paper into a tool to obtain food. Now another bird has followed suit: Goffin’s cockatoos (Cacatua goffiniana) have shown that they can tear cardboard into the shape of a tool to get
Month: November 2018
Ozone-depleting substances are continuing to decrease more than three decades after a major international agreement phased out their production, according to a recently released UN-backed report. We’ll need to wait a few decades before raising the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner. Knowing it’ll take unprecedented levels of social change to combat global warming, the report even provides
According to historical accounts, the ancient Gauls of Europe 2,000 years ago had a grisly means of commemorating their most prestigious kills: they would embalm the severed heads of these foes, and keep them. Now, for the first time, science has proven that the Gauls did indeed embalm severed heads. The Gauls were fearsome warriors,
Black holes, while fascinating, are hardly a new discovery – but a black hole spinning at one of the highest speeds ever, according to the Hindustan Times, is a completely different story – especially when there have only ever been four others like it. In 2016, India’s first dedicated astronomy satellite, the AstroSat, spotted a
If you’ve ever thought your poo is just a bunch of dead cells, think again. Most of it is alive, teeming with billions of microbes. Here’s what studies in healthy adults reveal makes up our poo. Water Our faeces is largely (75 percent) made up of water, although this differs from person to person. Vegetarians
Fireworks are a brilliant way to celebrate special occasions such as New Year’s Eve and Guy Fawkes Night, as well as big sporting events and independence days – right? Not if you happen to be an animal. All animals, domesticated and wild, are hardwired by evolution to find loud noises frightening. It is an automatic
There was a huge amount of excitement when the Higgs boson was first spotted back in 2012 – a discovery that bagged the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2013. The particle completed the so-called standard model, our current best theory of understanding nature at the level of particles. Now scientists at the Large Hadron Collider
Humanity’s artistic heritage just got a new historical milestone. In a cave wall deep in the forests of the isle of Borneo, archaeologists have just confirmed that a depiction of some sort of cow is the world’s oldest known figurative piece of art. It dates back to between 40,000 and 52,000 years ago, during the
Thanks to the way research is conducted, our perception of human psychology is based largely on subjects who are largely western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic. Which is a little… WEIRD. UC Santa Barbara anthropologist Michael Gurven argues this has to change, and has turned to an isolated indigenous population in the Bolivian Amazon to
Roughly one billion light-years from Earth, a giant elliptical galaxy has been found to be an enthusiastic recycler – albeit not of plastic bottles. The supermassive black hole at its core is blasting cold molecular gas, which is then falling into the black hole, and feeding the cycle anew. Such a phenomenon is known as
You step off the plane, having travelled across the world to the opposite hemisphere. The seasons are all backwards, and when you look up at the full Moon, you realise it’s not even the right way up! Not only is this incredibly weird (mostly because, how did we not realise this before?), but this curious
The first components of the International Space Station (ISS) launched into space more than 20 years ago, and it’s been continuously occupied for 18. Right now, it’s the only operational space station in orbit – but that’s about to change. China just unveiled a life-size replica of the core module of the country’s new space
It’s a mystery that scientists have been trying to solve for nearly a century. How did the world’s smallest flightless bird end up on a remote island in the middle of the South Atlantic? The Inaccessible Island rail (Atlantisia rogersi) is a tiny, flightless bird – 15 to 17 centimetres long – that is only
With an underwater jet pack, a black wet suit and a tiny briefcase laden with wires, Rui Matsumoto looked like a spy on a sabotage mission. In truth, the scientist was on a different sort of assignment in the Galápagos Islands, though the stakes were equally high. Matsumoto had come to perform sonograms on the
A proposal to create the world’s largest marine reserve in Antarctica is dead in the water after failing to secure unanimous support from participating nations. If it had passed, the vast sanctuary would have been the largest wildlife reserve on Earth, protecting three new regions in the icy south, a total of 1.8 million square
It’s a big Universe, that’s for sure, which means we might not necessarily cross paths with any other lifeforms that might be out there. But if we want to attract the attention of any galactic neighbours, apparently we could use laser technology we already have right now. Today’s lasers could be repurposed to act as
Earth is too big to fit into an X-ray or MRI scanner, so a group of physicists in Spain found a fascinating new way to peer inside - they used the subatomic particles constantly streaming through the planet. The team scanned the interior of Earth using neutrinos – and even used them to conduct an entirely
Any species reaching for the stars is bound to have its fingertips singed. Probably more than once. One of NASA’s latest posts on the Astronomy Picture of the Day website is an iconic reminder of the mishaps in our spacefaring history. “A flying saucer from outer space crash-landed in the Utah desert after being tracked
The natural world is a strange and wonderful place. But sometimes biologists come across something that is just… odd. Really, really odd. Case in point: this peculiar arachnid photographed by natural scientist Andreas Kay in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest in July 2017. By all appearances, it looks like it has the tiny head of a black
Hanging about in space can do pretty strange things to the human body, which is poorly adapted to life without gravity. It can create a slew of health problems, keeping clean is a huge hassle, and doing a wee is majorly awkward. But is it true, as a Snapple cap asserts, that you can’t burp?
Staring at the night sky can be a mind-boggling, existential experience, so every once in a while, it’s nice to see a friendly face staring back at us. In a new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the stars have aligned to give us just that. Here, nestled among a sea of galaxies, is a
Sam Ballard swallowed the slug on a dare. The young rugby player from Sydney was a “larrikin” – a “rough-and-tumble” free spirit, his mother said. So when the creature crawled across a table at a party in 2010 and his buddies dared him to eat it, her son accepted the challenge, she said. “Twenty-year-old boys,
No matter how abundant or renewable, solar power has a thorn in its side. There is still no cheap and efficient long-term storage for the energy that it generates. The solar industry has been snagged on this branch for a while, but in the past year alone, a series of four papers has ushered in
You may never have heard of the small Japanese island of Esanbe Hanakita Kojima, but it’s just hit the headlines after disappearing into the ocean – apparently without anyone noticing for quite some time. A combination of wind and the impacts from drift ice is thought to have sunk the island beneath the waves, as
Whenever we hear of stars discovered that formed just after the Big Bang, they’re very far away, in the far reaches of the visible Universe. But now astronomers have spotted something new: a star that’s around 13.5 billion years old, right here in our own Milky Way galaxy. It’s called 2MASS J18082002–5104378 B, and it
Somewhere on the bottom of the world, 33-year-old Colin O’Brady is readying for a task that no human has successfully accomplished. He’s about to travel 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometres) across Antarctica alone, without any resupply support. Everyone who has ever attempted that solo journey has either given up or died. “This is something that no
Sick of life right now on Earth? Head to Mars instead. Virtually, that is. Google Mars lets you explore the Red Planet without the 140-million-mile (225-million-kilometre) journey. It’s one of the most detailed maps of the planet ever made, thanks to data collected from NASA satellites and then put together in association with NASA scientists
A mud puddle doesn’t really sound all that threatening, but there’s one in California’s Imperial County that’s so troublesome, an emergency had to be declared earlier this year. It’s called the Niland Geyser and it’s exactly that, a geyser of bubbling mud. But there’s a strange twist – this menacing puddle has been slowly creeping across
Sir David Attenborough is much beloved as a broadcaster and naturalist, but a recent interview about his new BBC documentary series has stirred up some heated discussions in the environmental community. Ahead of the latest five-part nature series called Dynasties, Attenborough was interviewed by Jonathan Watts at the Observer (a UK Sunday newspaper and sister publication to The Guardian) about
All over the world, some truly groundbreaking telescopes are being built that will usher in a new age of astronomy. Sites include the mountain of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, Australia, South Africa, southwestern China, and the Atacama Desert – a remote plateau in the Chilean Andes. In this extremely dry environment, multiple arrays are being
You might be pretty distracted by the news of the world this week. You might not want to read any news at all, although we always think that science is a safe exception. Either way, since you’re here already, we’ve prepared an easy and shareable wrap of last week’s discoveries in science. If you’d like
Nothing lasts forever, especially an iceberg drifting away from its frigid home. This coffin-shaped iceberg was spotted by astronauts on the International Space Station as it drifted northwards. It split off from a much larger iceberg about 18 years ago, and is moving into warmer and warmer waters. The coffin-shaped iceberg has a name: B15-T.
Explaining consciousness is one of the hardest problems in science and philosophy. Recent neuroscientific discoveries suggest that a solution could be within reach – but grasping it will mean rethinking some familiar ideas. Consciousness, I argue in a new paper, may be caused by the way the brain generates loops of energetic feedback, similar to
On October 19th, 2017, the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System-1 (Pan-STARRS-1) in Hawaii announced the first-ever detection of an interstellar asteroid, named 1I/2017 U1 (AKA ‘Oumuamua). In the months that followed, multiple follow-up observations were conducted that allowed astronomers to get a better idea of its size and shape, while also revealing that it had the
When your old Aunt Petunia passes away, there’s a good chance her body will either be reduced to ash inside a purpose-built kiln or buried in an expensive (but not too expensive) wooden box next to the decaying remains of Uncle Harold. If only she’d lived in another time, or another place, things could have
Giant pandas are by nature solitary animals, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t well-versed in the language of love. Far from it. When spring arrives and these giant creatures get frisky, effective communication is one of biggest turn-ons. And these pandas know exactly how to express their interest. By recording giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) before,
Almost on the cusp of the Mariana Trench, before it plunges down into the very bowels of the ocean, scientists have found something rare and wonderful. Sometime in 2015, an underwater volcano experienced a massive eruption, spewing molten magma into the surrounding ocean. As the incredibly hot magma meets the water, it begins to rapidly
From deep in the guts of the Earth, a rare treasure has emerged: one of the largest single emeralds ever found. Hailing from the Kagem emerald mine in Zambia, it’s been named Inkalamu, a Chibemba word that means “Lion Emerald”. The beautiful stone weighs a whopping 5,655 carats (1,131 grams, or 39.9 ounces). According to
When Octavius the octopus arrived at the University of Georgia’s Marine Education Center and Aquarium in August, they were holding onto a secret. Well, ten thousand secrets, to be precise. Despite the name, it now turns out that Octavius is female. But the real surprise was that she also happened to be pregnant; the keepers
Just days after we learned about the demise of the Kepler telescope, another NASA mission has come to an end. Tens of thousands of kilometres above the largest object in the asteroid belt, the cold body of a Dawn spacecraft now orbits in silence. Having missed several scheduled communications, the probe has been declared out
The oceans are the world’s thankless, built-in air purifiers. Over the past couple hundred years, as humans have burned coal, cleared forests, put gas-powered cars and trucks on the road, and run air conditioners and refrigerators, the oceans have been quietly gathering up most of the carbon emissions those activities spew into the air. They
Once upon a time the Earth was ours to share. But after decades of heavy industrial expansion, the most pristine and untouched parts are held by just a few. Today, 70 percent of the world’s remaining wilderness is confined to just five countries. The reality of this widespread destruction is illustrated in a new global
One of the difficulties in developing quantum computers to their full potential – and there are quite a few – is cutting out interference. With technology as delicate as this, any kind of environmental noise or imperfection that affects the careful balance of a quantum computer could cause havoc with its calculations. To overcome this
The pyramids of Egypt are an architectural marvel. Yet, made up as they are of blocks that averaged 2.3 metric tonnes (in the case of the great pyramid), exactly how the ancient Egyptians constructed them thousands of years ago remains somewhat of a mystery. A new archaeological discovery may, however, shed some light on how at
A major problem with Mars missions: Bringing enough fuel for a return journey. In a striking new first-person account in IEEE Spectrum, NASA team lead Kurt Leucht writes about how the space agency is hard at work on a potential solution he hopes will let future Mars missions – or even colonists – extract rocket
Strap yourselves in, because CERN has something up its sleeve. On Thursday 1 November, Large Hadron Collider (LHC) physicists will be discussing the fact that they may have found a new and unexpected new particle. “I’d say theorists are excited and experimentalists are very sceptical,” CERN physicist Alexandre Nikitenko told The Guardian. “As a physicist
Astronomers just observed the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy sucking blobs of hot gas toward their doom at 30 percent of the speed of light. That’s an incredible 201 million mph (323 million km/h), which was enough to trigger three powerful bursts of radiation from the cloud. Researchers detected
Neanderthals are often depicted as barrel-chested, hunched-over cavemen, but a close inspection of their fossils is telling a different story. For the first time, an international team of researchers has reconstructed the ribcage and upper spine of a Neanderthal man who died roughly 60,000 years ago. The findings suggest that contrary to popular images, these