For hundreds of years, people have been proud that they are the only species that can do complicated maths. But what if we aren’t the only ones? More and more studies show that many animals, from tiny insects to clever crows, have a natural sense of numbers that helps them stay alive by letting them ...
Doctors were shocked to find that the new kidney they were going to give a 61-year-old man was full of parasitic worms. This nearly cost him his life. Ten weeks after the surgery, the patient was taken back to Massachusetts General Hospital (MassGen) in bad shape, throwing up, having a fever, and having trouble breathing. ...
In 1860, a farmer in the quiet Slovak village of Ivanka pri Nitre found something much more unusual than roots or rocks, a beautiful crown with gold panels buried in the ground. Historians, archaeologists, and art experts would spend the next hundred years arguing about whether this accidental discovery was the lost treasure of Byzantine ...
Astronomers have been trying to figure out what “hot Jupiters” are for decades. These are gas giants that orbit very close to their stars and complete a full revolution in just a few hours. But their rarer cousins, double hot Jupiters, are even more mysterious. In a binary star system, two of these planets orbit ...
The Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth, has been covered in an unexpected layer of snow. In this area, rain is measured in millimetres and decades can go by without a single drop. The rare storm put the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), one of the world’s most advanced radio telescopes, into “survival mode,” ...
Astronomers have found a rare Jupiter-sized planet hiding at the edge of the Milky Way using a phenomenon that Albert Einstein predicted more than a hundred years ago. This is part of a cosmic detective story that has been going on for years. Gravitational microlensing, which uses the bending of space-time itself, found the exoplanet ...
Scientists have been trying to figure out what a strange patch of cold water in the North Atlantic is for years. Climate change has caused the rest of the world’s oceans to steadily warm, but the North Atlantic Warming Hole has cooled by up to 0.5°F (0.3°C) over the past century, which was not what ...
A stretch of streaked grey rock in a remote, windy part of northern Quebec has sparked one of geology’s most heated debates. The Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt (NGB) is a rough outcrop on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay. It may have the oldest intact rocks on Earth, dating back an incredible 4.16 billion years14. If ...
There are huge, invisible structures in the ionosphere that are high above the surface of the Earth. These structures are called equatorial plasma bubbles (EPBs). These turbulent areas of low-density plasma can be up to 60 miles (100 km) wide and mess up GPS signals, scramble radio communications, and even cause deadly military accidents. Now, ...
For more than 150 million years, science didn’t notice a small, fast-moving dinosaur that lived in the floodplains of Jurassic North America. It lived in the shadow of giants like Stegosaurus and Allosaurus. Palaeontologists are now having to rethink what they thought they knew about how dinosaurs evolved because of a new species called Enigmacursor ...
Gargi Chakravorty
