It’s springtime Down Under, and along with overexuberant local football fans, that means another annual menace on Australian streets: angry birds. September is peak magpie breeding season. And like much of Australia’s native wildlife — think deadly snakes, spiders and jellyfish — the country’s magpies are meaner than those found elsewhere. Male birds defending their

This Friday in the lead-up to the United Nations climate summit, children and adults worldwide will go on strike for stronger action on climate change. However, you may ask, is striking effective? What can it really hope to achieve? Our research, recently published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, suggests striking can promote the psychological

A 16-year-old Swedish climate activist demanded Wednesday that Congress “listen to the scientists” who were sounding the alarm on the threat of global warming. Rather than offer prepared remarks to the House Climate Crisis Committee and a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee, Greta Thunberg said she was attaching as testimony a landmark 2018 United Nations report

The US Navy has for the first time confirmed that a set of eerie, grainy videos that appear to show UFOs flying through the sky are indeed real – and contain phenomena the military still cannot identify. The sensational footage in question – which began appearing in media outlets including The New York Times from

In what might constitute the year’s strangest salvo against the scourge of “fake news”, anthropologists have experimentally tested whether you can really make a knife out of frozen excrement. They conclude that you cannot. Back in 1998, University of British Columbia anthropologist and popular writer Wade Davis recounted in his book Shadows in the Sun

In a coastal town in Washington state, climate change has a high school junior worried about the floods that keep deluging his school. A 17-year-old from Texas says global warming scares him so much he can’t even think about it. But across the country, teens are channeling their anxieties into activism. “Fear,” said Maryland 16-year-old

According to new research, the dead may not always rest in peace… quite literally. For more than a year after death, corpses move around “significantly”, and this finding could be important for forensic investigations. Researchers at an Australia-based decomposition research facility – colloquially known as a “body farm”, a term some scientists find disrespectful –

In late July 1997, William Earl Moldt left a nightclub and was never seen again. Until last month, that is. After 22 years on missing persons lists, his last resting place was finally spotted – from space. By random chance, somebody noticed the vehicle Moldt was driving the night he disappeared – a white 1994

More than 350 years after its first publication, you might think John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost poem had given up all the secrets it had to give – but it turns out there are still discoveries to be made, concealed inside these thousands of lines of verse. Undergraduate Miranda Phaal from Tufts University in Massachusetts

Last week, behavioural scientist Magnus Söderlund posed a controversial question at a seminar in Sweden: Can you imagine eating human flesh? As global temperatures continue to rise, Söderlund said in a talk at the Gastro Summit in Stockholm, the consequences for agriculture could cause food to become more scarce, which might force humans to consider

Neuroscientists think they have found a key area in our brains that helps us assess and respond to what we find beautiful, also known as aesthetic appeal. And that appeal could be more linked to our sense of self than you might expect. When something pleases us visually – whether it’s a fine piece of

In the story of our species, Africa is known as the cradle of humanity. Somewhere on this vast continent, hundreds of thousands of years ago, a group of early humans is thought to have diverged from the others, ultimately spreading across Africa and the rest of the world. These were the first ancestors of modern

In a finding that demonstrates just how amazingly flexible the human brain can be, a new study of two foot painters has revealed that their brains are now mapping their feet almost as if they were hands.  Researchers studied fMRI scans of the two professional UK foot painters born without hands – who also use

A Tokyo-based cashier allegedly stole credit card information from 1,300 customers. According to police, he used only his brain to take the information. Yusuke Taniguchi, 34, was arrested Thursday when police said they discovered he used the stolen information to purchase bags worth an estimated US$2,600 in March, according to CNN. The police intercepted that

Almost a third of American adults don’t have the math skills necessary to make effective decisions about their health and finances. These 73 million people can count, sort and do simple arithmetic. But they likely cannot select the health plan with the lowest cost based on annual premiums and deductibles, or figure out that they

New research on one of the most fascinating Dead Sea Scrolls suggests there’s something highly unusual about where and how it was made. Estimated to be close to 2,000 years old, the remarkably well-preserved Dead Sea Scrolls contain ancient texts of great historical importance. Since the initial discovery in 1947 by Bedouin shepherds, scholars have

Mathematicians have finally figured out the three cubed numbers that add up to 42. This has settled a problem that has been pondered for 65 years: namely, can each of the natural numbers below 100 be expressed as the sum of three cubes? The problem, set in 1954, is exactly what it sounds like: x3+y3+z3=k.

When the Boknis Eck Observatory – an environmental monitoring station on the floor of the Baltic Sea off the coast of Germany – stopped sending data on 21 August, scientists thought there was a problem with the data transmission. But when they sent divers down to check, the whole 740-kilogram (1,630-pound) car-sized kit and kaboodle

In 2015, a psychologist in Italy figured out how to induce a drug-free altered state of consciousness by asking 20 volunteers to sit and stare into each other’s eyes for 10 minutes straight. Not only did the deceptively simple task bring on strange ‘out of body’ experiences for the volunteers, it also caused them to

For the first time, researchers have been able to highlight specific gene regions that appear to have some influence over left-handedness – and they’ve also found links to differences in brain structure in those who have these genetic variations, too. It’s already been established that whether we’re right- or left-handed depends to some extent –

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

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

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

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

Back in 2017, neuroscientists used a classic branch of maths in a totally new way to peer into the structure of our brains. What they discovered is that the brain is full of multi-dimensional geometrical structures operating in as many as 11 dimensions. We’re used to thinking of the world from a 3-D perspective, so

A new study has revealed an unsettling truth about the citation metrics that are commonly used to gauge scientists’ level of impact and influence in their respective fields of research. Citation metrics indicate how often a scientist’s research output is formally referenced by colleagues in the footnotes of their own papers – but a comprehensive

For the first time, brain tissue grown in a lab has spontaneously exhibited electrical activity, and it looks startlingly similar to human brain activity. More specifically, it resembles the brain activity of premature babies. This is a huge discovery that brings on possibilities for studying the early development of brain disorders. It also has left some

Fundamentally, the cranes that dot city skylines today aren’t hugely different from the ones that the Greeks invented sometime around the late sixth century BCE – a remarkable effort of engineering. But new research argues that the Greeks may have used a clever lifting mechanism more than a century before they even invented cranes. There’s

Another face of our Australopithecus ancestors can now peer at us from further back in time than ever before, after its recovery from Earth’s clutches in Afar, Ethiopia. Previously, this hominin species had only been known from skull fragments, teeth, and limb bones. A local, Ali Bereino, discovered the first piece of this elusive skull

It was the largest, most elaborate society the Americas had ever seen. And it was about to come to an abrupt end. By the Late Horizon of the Inca Empire, the epic civilisation stretched all the way from Colombia in the north to Chile in the south. Imperial fortunes would soon change – violently, at

Many of us know that feeling of waking up, headache in tow, struggling to remember what we said and did after that extra drink the night before. And then suddenly, the memories vividly resurface. Alcohol disinhibits us, making us say and do things that we’d otherwise keep under wraps. People will often drink to gain

The tiny Polish village of Miejsce Odrzanskie has become the unlikely source of international media attention over the past fortnight as a result of what the New York Times called “a strange population anomaly“. It has now been almost a decade since the last boy was born in this place, with the most recent 12

No matter how good you think you look, there’s something about posting a selfie that might frame you in a bad light. An experiment on hundreds of real Instagram users has now found those who post a lot of selfies come across as less likeable, less successful, more insecure, and less outgoing. These negative perceptions

The wreck of what may be the most famous and infamous sea vessel in history has been visited by humans for the first time in almost 15 years – revealing an incredible state of natural deterioration hidden deep within the Atlantic Ocean. Rusting in silent isolation at a depth of 3,810 metres (about 12,500 feet)

You might have heard the maxim that with 10,000 hours of practice you can become an expert at anything. Well, according to a new study of 39 violinists, that might be too optimistic. You see, that 10,000-hour ‘rule’ was first proposed by another study of musicians – including violinists – back in 1993. It concluded

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

Vulnerable spadefoot tadpoles eat their smaller competitors to speed towards toadhood as quickly as possible. Gulls and pelicans are among bird species that eat hatchlings for food or to prevent the spread of disease. In insect species such as the praying mantis or the Australian redback spider, males offer their bodies as a final gift

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

Storytelling is one of humanity’s most powerful tools. Commonly used by educators, politicians and advertisers, stories have the power to influence and teach, inspire and persuade. But there’s been some debate over whether stories help convince people of facts, or have the opposite effect. Now a new study has shown that it depends on the

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,

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

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

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

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

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

What lengths would you go to if your survival truly depended upon it? Probably more than you give yourself credit for. Humans are versatile creatures, and throughout our history we’ve appeared in unexpected places, such as one mountainous area in Ethiopia 45,000 years ago. Possibly due to a lack of water in the valleys, these

What can be done with the deserted land in Ukraine after Chernobyl’s catastrophic nuclear disaster? Three decades on, researchers have an idea. Introducing “Atomik” vodka: a new spirit produced from crops grown in Chernobyl’s exclusion zone. A team of British scientists worked alongside colleagues in Ukraine to produce the vodka, made with grain and water

The 17th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler was one of the first to muse about the structure of snowflakes. Why are they so symmetrical? How does one side know how long the opposite side has grown? Kepler thought it was all down to what we would now call a “morphogenic field” – that things want to have