In June 2023, scientists around the world announced the first official detection of the gravitational wave background — a cacophonous symphony of gravitational waves coming from every direction in space. Buried within that cosmic noise,...

The pain reliever known as acetaminophen or paracetamol, marketed under brand names like Tylenol, Calpol or Panadol, has an excellent reputation. But the quality of evidence that it actually works is shockingly poor. So, do doctors and...

Neutron stars, are some of the most extreme phenomenon in the universe. It's doubly so for a subset known as pulsars. Some are spinning so fast, and are so massive, that astronomers aren't entirely sure how they got to be that way. One...

Zabargad Island in the Red Sea is so crusted with peridot that it's fair to say the place is literally made of it. <br/>

The laws of physics don’t specify an arrow of time - they don’t distinguish the past from the future. The equations we use to describe how things evolve forward in time also perfectly describe their evolution backwards in time. So the...

Black holes are about the worst subjects for direct study in the universe. But at this stage, it’s all we can do to convince ourselves of their existence. Actually studying the physics of real black holes is much, much harder. I mean, we...

It’s fair to say that black holes may be the scariest objects in the universe. Happily for us, the nearest is probably many light-years away. Unless of course, Planck relics are a thing - in which case they might be literally everywhere.

We know that gravity exerts its pull on light, and we have an explanation for why. Actually, we have multiple explanations that all predict the same thing. And at first glance, these explanations seem to describe completely different...

A new white dwarf has been discovered (poetically named: ZTF J1901+1458) that’s doing some stuff that no white dwarf should ever be able to do. In fact, it has multiple properties that are so extreme that it almost certainly did NOT form...

By the time you've read this, a billion billion dark matter particles may have streamed through your body like ghosts. The particle or particles of the dark sector make up the vast majority of the mass of the universe - so to them, we're...

Neils Bohr said, “It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.” Well it turns out that if we pay attention to this subtle difference, some of the most...

Astronomers are the worst at naming things. Dark energy AND dark matter? Who can remember which is which. But perhaps one astronomer has just fixed it, with a theory that says perhaps actually they are they same stuff.

Early primates not only lived in North America -- our primate family tree actually originated here! So what happened to those early relatives of ours?

A truly enormous ichthyosaur around the size of a modern sperm whale, reached its size within just a few million years of taking to the water - a blink of an eye in evolutionary time.

About 59 million years ago, the largest animal lurking in the ancient forests of Colombia by far was Titanoboa - the largest snake ever known. It’s only been in the past few years that we’ve put together the many pieces of this puzzling...

In 2003, microbiologists made a huge discovery. One that would force us to reconsider a lot of what we thought we knew about the evolution of microbial life: giant viruses.

It arose from rhino ancestors that were a lot smaller, but Paraceratherium would take a different evolutionary path. Believe it or not, it actually became so big that it probably got close to what scientists think might be the actual...

Untangling the origins of Beelzebufo -- the giant frog that lived alongside the dinosaurs -- turns out to be one of the most bedeviling problems in the history of amphibians.

We tend to think that evolution only goes in one direction— toward getting bigger and more advanced. But that’s not always the case. This tiny, simple animal, the Myxozoans, (yes, animal!) evolved from something bigger and more complex.

You’re alive right now… at least I’m pretty sure you are. But you’re not TOTALLY alive. Bits of you are always breaking down, being thrown out, and being replaced. Even right now, parts of you are dying. Some of your cells even died...

Precious metals like gold, silver, platinum, and rhodium are expensive because they're rare in Earth's crust. But are they rare in the universe? Why is it so hard to make some of the chemical elements? Where do heavy metals come from,...

Animals as simple as bees and as complex as you and me… like to have fun. But what’s the point of fun? Do all animals have fun? And for that matter, what is fun?

We've heard news of "peak oil" and "the end of the oil age" for years now, but we keep coming up with ways to find and pump more of it to the surface. Rising CO2 levels and the changing climate that results from burning fossil fuels mean...

You may not be an expert, but perhaps you feel pretty confident that you could ride a motorcycle, or give someone a decent haircut - if you absolutely had to - right? Not so much, according to the psychological phenomenon known as the...