Octopus is a popular ingredient in many cuisines, with some 420,000 metric tons of this mollusc being caught worldwide each year. | Continue reading
The world's favorite herbicide is making it harder for buff-tailed bumblebees to keep their hives warm enough to incubate larvae, new research finds. | Continue reading
The dawn of human civilization is often pinned down to the rise of farming. As food production grew, so did human populations, trade, and tax. | Continue reading
Jupiter's moon Europa is a prime candidate in the search for life. The frozen moon has a subsurface ocean, and evidence indicates it's warm, salty, and rich in life-enabling chemistry. | Continue reading
In 2014, amateur astronomers in New Zealand glimpsed a flare of light emanating from the constellation of Centauri. NASA later confirmed this blaze was a massive supernova explosion from another galaxy an incredible 57 million light-years away from o | Continue reading
A rare and exquisitely preserved dinosaur embryo tucked inside an egg like a baby bird has been unearthed in southern China, providing an "unprecedented glimpse" into dinosaur development. | Continue reading
We have a lot to thank meteorites for. Had they not instigated several mass extinction events, including wiping out non-avian dinosaurs, we probably wouldn't be here today. | Continue reading
A vast system of canyons that dramatically scars the face of Mars could be harboring reserves of hidden water. | Continue reading
Like a brain, an ant colony operates without central control. Each is a set of interacting individuals, either neurons or ants, using simple chemical interactions that in the aggregate generate their behaviour. | Continue reading
In an incredible historic first, a human-made spacecraft has swooped in and made contact with the Sun. | Continue reading
A deepwater robot, humming through the twilight zone of Monterey Bay, has managed to capture incredibly rare video footage of a giant phantom jelly. | Continue reading
The sticky leaves of a native Australian shrub, used by the nation's First Peoples as medicine, have been found to contain compounds that could possibly assist with cancer treatment. | Continue reading
Usage of the medication sildenafil – better known to most as the brand-name drug Viagra – is associated with dramatically reduced incidence of Alzheimer's disease, new research suggests. | Continue reading
We can add suggesting and proving mathematical theorems to the long list of what artificial intelligence is capable of: Mathematicians and AI experts have teamed up to demonstrate how machine learning can open up new avenues to explore in the field. | Continue reading
Are you in the market for a loophole in the laws that forbid perpetual motion? Knowing you've got yourself an authentic time crystal takes more than a keen eye for high-quality gems. | Continue reading
A major milestone has been breached in the quest for fusion energy. | Continue reading
A short burst of red light in the morning has been shown to improve declining eyesight, researchers report, potentially providing a simple, safe, and easy-to-use treatment for keeping our eyes sharper as we head into old age. | Continue reading
In the Wasatch Mountains of the western US on the slopes above a spring-fed lake, there dwells a single giant organism that provides an entire ecosystem on which plants and animals have relied for thousands of years. | Continue reading
She was flying home from a holiday in Samoa when she saw it through the airplane window: a "peculiar large mass" floating on the ocean, hundreds of kilometres off the north coast of New Zealand. | Continue reading
The UK has officially recognized octopuses and crabs as sentient beings – finally catching up to well-established science on these intelligent animals. | Continue reading
The space around the Milky Way isn't vacant. It's swarming with dwarf galaxies – small, faint, and low in mass, with as few as around 1,000 stars each. | Continue reading
For the satellites spinning around Earth, using electricity to ionize and push particles of xenon gets them to go where they need to go. While xenon atoms ionize easily and are heavy enough to build thrust, the gas is rare and expensive, not to menti | Continue reading
It appears that our Moon has been careless. | Continue reading
What does mindfulness mean to you? Is it about being aware of what comes your way without distraction? Or is it engaging with life's challenges without judgement, and responding as required? | Continue reading
A man paralyzed from the neck down due to a spinal cord injury he sustained in 2007 has shown he can communicate his thoughts, thanks to a brain implant system that translates his imagined handwriting into actual text. | Continue reading
A slight tweak in the activation of a single protein could determine whether some ants become lowly workers or reproductive queens, according to a new study. | Continue reading
A staggering amount of Roman emperors did not die of natural causes. That's not breaking news; it's literally ancient history. | Continue reading
You can't see them from the surface, but they're definitely there. Scientists have revealed the discovery of hundreds of ancient ceremonial sites, many of which belonged to the Maya civilization, hiding in plain sight just underneath the landscape of | Continue reading
Britain on Thursday became the first country to approve an anti-COVID pill, as it greenlit the use of Merck's antiviral drug to treat patients suffering from mild to moderate coronavirus, regulators said. | Continue reading
Nothing makes for a time capsule quite like amber. Sealed in the golden gloop, ancient life-forms are transported across eternity to the modern day, preserved in impeccable detail, in all their weirdness and glory. | Continue reading
Originally, they were thought to be just specks of dust on a microscope slide. | Continue reading
A 'visual prosthesis' implanted directly into the brain has allowed a blind woman to perceive two-dimensional shapes and letters for the first time in 16 years. | Continue reading
Dune, the epic series of sci-fi books by Frank Herbert, now turned into a movie of the same name, is set in the far future on the desert planet of Arrakis. Herbert outlined a richly detailed world that, at first glance, seems so real we could imagine | Continue reading
We design cities. We live in them. We work in them, and we have fun in them. But boy howdy are we bad at getting around them. | Continue reading
Andean condors are the heaviest soaring bird in the world, with a single individual weighing up to about 16 kilos (or 35 pounds). When it comes to keeping these hefty bodies aloft, the sky is very much the limit, according to new research. | Continue reading
Nobody knows who she was, just that she was different: a teenage girl from over 50,000 years ago of such strange uniqueness she looked to be a 'hybrid' ancestor to modern humans that scientists had never seen before. | Continue reading
One of the best-known regions of the brain, the cerebellum accounts for just 10 percent of the organ's total volume, but contains more than 50 percent of its neurons. | Continue reading
With over a hundred thousand people waiting for an organ transplant in the US alone, scientists are racing to find options besides human donors. Now for the first time, a pig kidney has been successfully transplanted into a person. | Continue reading
For most of the time since the first description of multiple sclerosis (MS) in 1868, the causes of this disabling disease have remained uncertain. Genes have been identified as important, which is why having other family members with MS is associated | Continue reading
For the vast majority of animals on Earth, breath is synonymous with life. Yet for the first 2 billion years of our planet's existence, oxygen was in scarce supply. | Continue reading
Mysterious structures in the sky that have puzzled astronomers for decades might finally have an explanation – and it's quite something. | Continue reading
For now, life is flourishing on our oxygen-rich planet, but Earth wasn't always that way – and scientists have predicted that, in the future, the atmosphere will revert back to one that's rich in methane and low in oxygen. | Continue reading
At some point in life, you have probably enjoyed a 'flow' state – when you're so intensely focused on a task or activity, you experience a strong sense of control, a reduced awareness of your environment and yourself, and a minimized sense of the p | Continue reading
For now, life is flourishing on our oxygen-rich planet, but Earth wasn't always that way – and scientists have predicted that, in the future, the atmosphere will revert back to one that's rich in methane and low in oxygen. | Continue reading
You probably wouldn't pick microscopic roundworms as the nurturing kind, but here's a fun fact for your day – these commonly studied nematodes squirt a kind of egg-milk out of their vulvas to feed their young. | Continue reading
Seeing our world through the eyes of a migratory bird would be a rather spooky experience. Something about their visual system allows them to 'see' our planet's magnetic field, a clever trick of quantum physics and biochemistry that helps them naviga | Continue reading
It's something that has long been suspected. Now, we have evidence from a new study – once the Autopilot self-driving tech is enabled on Tesla cars, human drivers tend to pay less attention to what's happening on the road. | Continue reading
Researchers have managed to keep tabs on 1 million different neurons in the brains of mice at one time – taking scientists an impressive step closer towards one day being able to track the very-complex activity of human brains. | Continue reading