An artist’s impression of Earth in the Archaean Eon, 3.8 billion to 2.5 billion years ago CHRISTIAN JEGOU/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Mysterious microbes living in wetlands in China have helped to narrow down when the ancestor of all animals and plants lived – and the oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere may have played a key role in…
Real aliens may not be so obvious, if we ever find them Naeblys/Alamy If you’re the kind of person who keeps an eye on astronomical news – or glances at any news site – you may have seen a story about hints of a sign of alien life on an exoplanet called K2-18b. The claim…
Scientists analyzing data from NASA’s CODEX (Coronal Diagnostic Experiment) investigation have successfully evaluated the instrument’s first images, revealing the speed and temperature of material flowing out from the Sun. These images, shared at a press event Tuesday at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, illustrate the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, is not…
Mark Poynting Climate reporter, BBC News Noaa/Reuters Hurricane Milton, in October 2024, was one of the Atlantic’s strongest recorded storms The coming Atlantic hurricane season is expected to be busier than usual, US science agency NOAA has warned, just as cuts to American research are raising fears about the ability to track and prepare for…
Superb starlings take an unusual approach to co-parenting Grahame Cornforth / Alamy Stock Photo They say it takes a village to raise a child; for these birds, it is no different. Superb starlings not only help raise other starlings’ chicks, but they also switch between the roles of “parent” and “nanny” multiple times throughout their…
An artist’s impression of gas and dust around the massive black hole at the centre of the galaxy SDSS1335+0728 ESO/M. Kornmesser Strange X-ray pulses blasted out from a recently awakened monster black hole are the most powerful astronomers have seen, and may help explain how these cosmic behemoths emerge from their slumber. A few years…
“A human mind-melded to a rat could move with the rodent, and smell and feel what it sensed…” Shutterstock/Linda Bestwick In T. H. White’s series of novels The Once and Future King, the wizard Merlyn turns the young Arthur, future king of England, into a variety of animals. As a small fish, Arthur swims in…
“Have you ever seen a fungus move in real life?” Episode 2 of the new season of The Last of Us HBO There was something I loved and something I hated in the first season of The Last of Us, the post-apocalyptic TV show based on the hit video game of the same name, in…
Living things produce “biophotons” Tim Robberts/Getty Images All living things, including humans, constantly emit a ghostly glow – and it appears to vanish almost as soon as we die. Monitoring this signal could one day help track forest health or even detect diseases in people. The existence of this barely perceptible glow has been controversial,…
When Michael Collins floated above the far side of the moon during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, he knew he would be remembered as the loneliest human in history. He recalled feeling unafraid, almost exultant, thinking about everything on the other side of the moon: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface…
