The evolutionary arms race between predator and prey has given rise to many impressive defence mechanisms; as it turns out, the lowly moth is no exception. These unassuming creatures may not have the charming appearance of their butterfly cousins, but their furry facade conceals some tricks that would impress the most advanced military division. Over
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Scientists are now closer than ever to being able to use graphene as a superconductor – to conduct electricity with zero resistance – making it useful for developing energy efficient gadgets, improving medical research, upgrading power grids, and much more besides. The key to the new approach is heating a silicon carbide (SiC) crystal, itself a
We’re facing a deadly Catch 22. As the world grows hotter, people crank up the air con. As they crank the air con, the world grows hotter. And so on. And so on. If it seems like there’s no escape from this gloomy, no-win situation, take heart: a new technology developed by scientists from the
An unusual warbler in Pennsylvania has been discovered harbouring an incredible genetic secret. He’s the hybrid of not two, but three different species of bird. His mother was a hybrid of two warblers – and his father was a warbler of an entirely different third genus. “It’s extremely rare,” said ornithologist David Toews of Cornell
An ancient Egyptian necropolis dating back thousands of years has yielded a bunch of mummies of the sort you might not expect when you hear the word. Instead of important personages, the sarcophagi were hiding dozens of mummified cats, and a rare collection of mummified scarab beetles. And there might be rarer treasure still. While
Another week, another round of great achievements in science – from discovering the oldest figurative cave art we’ve ever seen, to gazing out into the Universe, there is always something new to learn about our world and beyond. Below you’ll find our weekly round-up of last week’s science discoveries in a convenient picture you can
Researchers at Yale University have developed a seriously confusing optical illusion that is proving our human nature has some bizarre quirks. As part of the Neural Correlate Society’s annual optical illusions contest, the Yale researchers developed what they call the “Who’s Chasing Whom?” illusion. Take a look at the video the team developed. What do
On Friday, Apple announced that two of its products – the iPhone X and the 13-inch MacBook Pro (non Touch Bar) – have known hardware issues. Bloomberg first reported on these issues after being posted on Apple’s support pages on Friday. Apple said that on some iPhone X devices, display screens are experiencing touch issues. Those issues include: The
There’s no easy way to rate dog intelligence. It can be focused on more than one thing. As canine psychologist Stanley Coren wrote back in the ’90s, there’s adaptive intelligence (i.e., figuring stuff out), working intelligence (i.e. following orders), and instinctive intelligence (i.e. innate talent) – not to mention spatial intelligence, kinesthetic intelligence, interpersonal intelligence,
Why is my awareness here, while yours is over there? Why is the universe split in two for each of us, into a subject and an infinity of objects? How is each of us our own center of experience, receiving information about the rest of the world out there? Why are some things conscious and
“If one made a research grant application to work on time travel it would be dismissed immediately,” writes the physicist Stephen Hawking in his posthumous book Brief Answers to the Big Questions. He was right. But he was also right that asking whether time travel is possible is a “very serious question” that can still
Poachers that kill or maim elephants for their ivory tusks have decimated world elephant populations. According to new research, that activity has placed such a strain on elephant populations in Mozambique that it’s forcing the hand of evolution. Historically, only 2 to 4 percent of female African elephants were naturally tuskless — and now nearly
Polish astronomers just discovered two new planets in our galaxy. That’s cool news on its own, but these planets are different from most. Unlike almost all known planets, New Scientist reports, these two planets don’t orbit a star. Instead, they drift aimlessly through the cold, dead void of space — and presumably spend their time
An extraordinary account of the impact space weather had on military operations in Vietnam in 1972 was found buried in the US Navy archives, according to a newly published article in Space Weather. On August 4, 1972, the crew of a US Task Force 77 aircraft flying near a naval minefield in the waters off
According to some alarming tabloid headlines, three giant asteroids are skimming by Earth this weekend – one as long as a blue whale! Here’s what’s really going on: there are a number of asteroids about to zip through Earth’s general neighbourhood, according to a NASA asteroid watch website. But we’re not in any danger whatsoever
Who were the first Americans? While we have some rough ideas, the answer to this question has long been up for debate. Now, comparisons between two extraordinary sets of ancient American remains has added rich detail to the spread of ancient human populations through the New World more than 13,000 years ago. And it shows
At first glance, you might miss it. But among Central Park’s usual waterfowl crowd, there appears to be a new addition. And people are flocking to see him. A single, male Mandarin duck flaunts his multi-coloured feathers as he swims out among a posse of mallards and wood ducks. He’s not a local, and it’s
The best scientists are the ones that ask lots of questions, even when they may seem absurd to the rest of us – like, how many mosquitoes can you squeeze into just one cubic centimetre? The answer may seem like a meaningless pursuit, but there’s actually a point – it could help us in our
The sky above Earth is never completely dark. Even at night a soft glow emanates from the rim of the upper atmosphere. It’s always there, right above us, but it’s tricky to see from Earth. Lucky for us, an astronaut on board the International Space Station has captured the spectacular effect from space. The photograph
Of all our planet’s continents, we know the least about the icy landmass of Antarctica. Now, scientists have used satellite imagery to peer into Earth’s tectonics, revealing the hidden structures of Antarctica as part of their work. Due to its remote location and abundance of ice, charting the geological characteristics of Antarctica is tricky, but
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
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
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