One of the most famous and beloved cryptids in all the world is Scotland’s Loch Ness Monster. Reports describe a large, long-necked beast like a plesiosaur, yet Nessie has remained curiously elusive to scientific searches. Multiple sonar scans of the loch have come up blank. But there’s more than one way to skin a monster,
Month: September 2019
The heart of every major galaxy is thought to contain a supermassive black hole – a place where gravity is so strong that anything, including light, gets devoured. Like all black holes, supermassive ones form when stars collapse in on themselves at the end of their life cycles. On average, they’re millions of times more
When they started to film, scientists on the exploration vessel Nautilus could barely contain themselves. Way out in the Pacific Ocean, over 750 metres deep (2,500 feet), their remotely operated vehicle had stumbled upon one of the spookiest creatures they’d ever seen. At first, as they watched the dancing ghost-like entity, there were only questions:
Scientists have discovered what could be some of the very earliest animal trails left on the surface of Earth. The finding dates back to around half a billion years or so, and it could finally reveal more about this distant part of history, and the very first moving organisms. What makes the finding particular special
After 14 years of staring at a dead star, astronomers have once again confirmed Einstein’s theory of general relativity. PSR J1906+0746, a pulsar 25,000 light-years away, slightly wobbles as it spins – an effect that could see its pulses disappear from our sky in less than a decade. It’s called precession, a phenomenon predicted by
SpaceX is scouting for prime real estate to populate Mars, according to a database of NASA spacecraft photography. The database entries suggest the rocket company, founded by the tech mogul Elon Musk, is looking for relatively flat, warm, and hazard-free places to set down its coming launch vehicle, called Starship. A scientist at the University
Long before climate change drove them to abandon their thriving cities, a group of hunter-gatherers settled in the Indus River Valley as farmers, leading to the creation of one of the world’s first large-scale urban societies, complete with booming economies and long-distance trade. The Harappan civilisation, which peaked around 2,600 to 1,900 BCE, boasted pioneering
Assuming life on Earth evolved out of a hearty primordial soup spiced with organic space dust, it’s fair to ask how such life-generating molecules came about in the first place. We now have a much better idea, thanks to a new experiment. Researchers from the US Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have shown how two relatively
Despite its popular image of teeth and claws and thunder, Tyrannosaurus rex was no hot-head. New research indicates that the two mysterious holes in the top of the dinosaur’s skull likely helped regulate temperatures inside its head. Previously, these holes – called the dorsotemporal fenestra – were thought to be filled with muscles that helped
The science connecting climate change to hurricanes like Dorian is strong. Warmer oceans fuel more extreme storms; rising sea levels bolster storm surges and lead to worse floods. Just this summer, after analyzing more than 70 years of Atlantic hurricane data, NASA scientist Tim Hall reported that storms have become much more likely to “stall”
The US President has tweeted an American spy satellite image. After some sleuthing, astronomers were able to figure out which satellite it came from: a (formerly) top-secret satellite called USA 224, an optical reconnaissance satellite. Trump’s tweet unwittingly revealed some of the capabilities of American satellite imagery. USA 224 has been kept top-secret for national security
A compelling new study has found no link between testosterone in men and reduced cognitive empathy, a trait that is characteristically impaired in autism spectrum disorders. Ever since the very first clinical account of autism, almost eighty years ago, far more male children and adults have been placed on the spectrum than females. In all
It’s called the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM): a monumental and mysterious global warming event that scientists have never been able to fully explain. Well over 50 million years ago, this epic climate abnormality produced a massive injection of carbon into the atmosphere. The build-up lasted some 20,000 years, and sent global temperatures soaring by as
When it comes to knowing what kinds of minerals we might find inside the Moon, we’ve literally just scraped the surface. For one small team of Earth scientists from the US and Canada, that’s enough to suggest there’s treasure hiding deep below. Mining for riches is the last thing that’s on the researchers’ minds, though.
Scientists have invented a new method for turning carbon dioxide into a liquid fuel that can efficiently store energy in fuel cells. The fuel could one day be the future of green transport, cramming more energy into the tank than the same volume of hydrogen while also serving as a building block for a whole
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) are well above the path of Hurricane Dorian, but that isn’t stopping them from keeping a close eye on the storm – and sharing their unique vantage point with the rest of the world. On Monday, NASA astronaut Nick Hague tweeted a terrifying photo of the hurricane he’d
Baby loggerhead turtles have a lot standing between them and adulthood. The rolling hills of sand outside the comfort of their nests, not to mention the birds, sharks and other animals looking for a meal. Two heads on one body only makes the journey that much harder. A sea turtle patrol on Hilton Island in
The traffic in Earth’s orbit is getting busier. In space, there are no road rules, and with the number of active satellites on track to increase exponentially in the coming years, experts are increasingly worried about the risk of collisions. On Monday, the European Space Agency (ESA) was forced to move its observation satellite aside
How do we name and categorise colours? Scientists aren’t certain how these processes work in the brain, but a new case study of a stroke patient suggests that the neural processes of naming colours and categorising colours aren’t as interlinked as previously thought. The patient – for privacy reasons named only by his initials, RDS
Hidden along the north-east coast of the Spanish island of Mallorca, you’ll find the spectacular Coves d’Artà: a wondrous underground cave network filled with stalagmites and stalactites galore. These natural rock formations dominate stunning cavernous spaces given foreboding names like ‘Chamber of Purgatory’ and ‘Chamber of Hell’ – but the Artà Cave holds an ancient
Dogs are a weird bunch. They range in size from bearish behemoths like Newfoundlands to pipsqueaks like Milly, a Chihuahua who measures less than four inches tall and holds the Guinness record for World’s Shortest Dog. Some breeds are fast runners. Others are jumpers, swimmers or diggers. Bloodhounds specialize in sniffing, while greyhounds hunt primarily
Night and day on Saturn, the Solar System’s show-off, is utterly, devastatingly gorgeous. Sure, it doesn’t have the glittering lights of human habitation, like Earth does; what it does have is its spectacular rings. On Saturn’s night side, its shadow falls across part of its rings, dividing them sharply into night and day with a
China’s iPhone users have found a new craze – a new app called Zao which lets people convincingly and hilariously transpose their faces onto actors like Leonardo DiCaprio, Kit Harrington from Game of Thrones, and many others. Zao topped the Chinese iOS download chart over the weekend after first launching on the App Store on
An eerily calm photo taken Sunday shows the eye of Hurricane Dorian, one of the most powerful storms ever seen in the Atlantic. US Air Force pilots known as hurricane hunters are flying regular reconnaissance missions into Dorian, which strengthened to a Category 5 hurricane early Sunday as it tore through the northern Bahamas. Garrett
Hurricane Dorian has been unleashing an impressive lightning storm as it continues on its tragically destructive way. Looping together satellite images from the end of August, meteorologist Dakota Smith has put together a spectacular show of flashing lights within and around the storm’s swirling eye. “I created the loop mainly to visualise how incredible hurricanes
The asteroid 6478 Gault first drew attention to itself for sprouting a rare double trail of dust behind it, but now it’s treated astronomers to another surprise: a colour change. Asteroids have never before been caught in the act of shifting colours like this while under real-time observation. In the case of 6478 Gault, a
A team of researchers has just demonstrated quantum enhancement in an actual X-ray machine, achieving the desirable goal of eliminating background noise for precision detection. The relationships between photon pairs on quantum scales can be exploited to create sharper, higher-resolution images than classical optics. This emerging field is called quantum imaging, and it has some
For the first time in centuries, compasses in Greenwich are about to point directly at true north: an epic coincidence of time and magnetism that hasn’t taken place for some 360 years. This serendipitous occurrence – which is set to occur within the next fortnight – serves as a startling reminder of how Earth’s magnetic
It was found along the side of a road in a remote Australian gold rush town. In the old days, Wedderburn was a hotspot for prospectors – it occasionally still is – but nobody there had ever seen a nugget quite like this one. The Wedderburn meteorite, found just north-east of the town in 1951,
The social media team over at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) is having a bit of a moment. People have discovered just how awesome CERN’s Instagram is, and who can really blame them – the Large Hadron Collider is really pretty. But why should CERN get all the fun? If you want to science up
Chinese lunar rover Yutu-2 has rolled over a strange mystery on the far side of the Moon. At the bottom of a small, recent impact crater, the rover found a shiny unknown substance the Chinese space agency described as a “gel with a mysterious lustre”. Although Chinese scientists have not yet revealed what it might
New fires continue to crop up in the Amazon forest despite the Brazilian government’s most recent efforts to stop the deforestation of the region. The Brazilian National Space Research Institute (INPE) published satellite data showing that in the 48 hours after the Brazilian government’s ban on burning, issued Thursday, there have been 3,859 new fire
With peak winds of 185 mph (300 km/h), Hurricane Dorian is the strongest storm on record to strike the Bahamas, and it threatens to bring hurricane-force winds, coastal flooding and other impacts to the east coast of Florida and Southeastern US. Dorian ranks as tied for the second-strongest storm (as judged by its maximum sustained