Tropical diseases like dengue and West Nile virus were far-off hazards for decades, limited to warmer climates far from Britain’s temperate coastlines. But this week a startling revelation by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has disproved that presumption: fragments of West Nile virus (WNV) have been found in UK mosquitoes for the first time. ...
For decades, the megalodon, a terrible shark that ate only whales has been portrayed as the ultimate oceanic horror, its enormous jaws able to crush a car with a single bite. But shockingly more surprising new studies show Otodus megalodon was not the picky whale specialist we thought of. Rather, it was an opportunistic apex ...
In an amazing turn of events, a large-scale land reclamation project in Indonesia has resurrected a lost world, rather than only sand. While workers were building off an artificial island off Java, they dragged 6,700 fossils from the seafloor, including two skull fragments of Homo erectus, our ancient human predecessors. These 140,000-year-old fossils expose a ...
Far beneath the ocean’s sunlit surface, in crushing darkness and near-freezing temperatures, lurks a creature once thought to be a rarity of the deep. Alicella gigantea, the world’s largest amphipod, a shrimp-like crustacean that grows up to 34 cm (13.4 inches) long has long been considered an elusive oddity. But groundbreaking new research reveals this ...
Whales have long been hunted for their meat, blubber, and bones; but, when did people first start using these oceanic giants? According to a ground-breaking study, Paleolithic hunter-gatherers along the Bay of Biscay were creating sophisticated tools from whale bones long before organized whaling ever started 20,000 years ago. These revelations, buried for decades in ...
Today Mars is a frozen desert devoid of flowing water and with a rusty surface scuffed by dust storms. But billions of years ago, the Red Planet might have been a planet of rushing rivers, glittering lakes, even rain or snow falling from alien heavens. Suggesting Mars was far wetter and maybe warmer than previously ...
Long praised by athletes for its muscle-building properties, creatine is now generating waves for a completely different reason: possible Alzheimer’s disease prevention. A ground-breaking pilot study implies that widely available in health stores, creatine monohydrate could help Alzheimer’s sufferers have better cognitive ability. Although the results are preliminary, they create an intriguing new path in ...
The ground is actually blowing up in the far-off, frozen Yamal Peninsula of Siberia. Massive craters some as wide as 70 meters (230 feet) and deep enough to swallow a high-rise have started to show up without warning in 2014, leaving gaping wounds in the permifrost. These are violent, explosive events, hurling bits of earth ...
SpaceX’s Starship Flight 8 erupted in fireballs across the Atlantic Ocean on March 6 2025, the show was evident across Florida all the way to the Caribbean and was an eerie reminder of the difficult and gruelling challenges of rocket science. Behind the dramatic nature of the explosion is a fascinating story of engineering-related detective ...
Assuming these materials were inert and safe, hospitals have for decades depended on medical plastics used in everything from sutures to catheters. Unbelievably, though, some of the worst superbugs are eating rather than merely colonizing these devices. Researchers have found a strain of the well-known hospital pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa that generates an enzyme able to ...
