Detail of the main Huashan Rock art. Image Credit: Rolfmueller/Wikipedia Ancient paintings covering limestone cliffs in southern China may owe their remarkable survival to an unexpected ingredient known as ‘blood.’ A new study of the ‘Huashan rock art’ in Guangxi published in the ‘Journal of Archaeological Science’ suggests that the artists used a mixture containing…
Supermassive black holes are expected to outlast proton decay, but will eventually evaporate completely. Image Credit: D. Berry/Nasa Earth is expected to remain alive for an almost unimaginable length of time, but new calculations suggest that even massive objects could eventually disappear through a process similar to Hawking radiation. Scientists at Radboud University in the…
A wildfire in Utah has become the focus of an unusual airborne investigation, after towering clouds of smoke and hot air pushed towards the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Nasa aircraft are chasing these smoke-filled formations to understand what happens when an intense fire effectively starts generating its own weather. The clouds, known as pyrocumulonimbus…
Stephen Hawking‘s words offer a genuinely powerful reminder that a difficult situation rarely means every single possibility has actually disappeared. “However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at,” he said. “It matters that you don’t just give up.” He said this in a speech to the Oxford Union…
Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) SuBastian is deployed from the research vessel Falkor (too) in the South Atlantic during the expedition. Image Credit: Alex Ingle / Schmidt Ocean Institute An international team of marine scientists has discovered 31 new species in the ocean’s vast midwater zone during an expedition in the tropical South Atlantic off the…
Atolls can take up to 30 million years to form, but these tiny coral islands now support 31 million seabirds across the Indo-Pacific (PC: AI Generated) Atolls may look like tiny rings of sand and coral scattered across warm tropical oceans, but they are far more important than their small land areas. These unusual natural…
Representative Image of asteroid (585349) Eeuwes traveling through the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter (AI-generated image) A 1.5-kilometre asteroid orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter now carries the name of Astrid Eeuwes, a Dutch amateur astronomer from Nijmegen who spends much of her time studying micrometeorites, tiny particles of space material that…
Marie Curie once offered a powerful message about self-belief, perseverance and the importance of finding a purpose in life: “We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.” Curie wrote these words in a letter to her brother Joseph on March 18, 1894, when she…
Reconstructed Triassic landscape at the Museum am Löwentor, Stuttgart (Germany), with Chiniquodon theotonicus (left), Batrachotomus kupferzellensis (right), and, poorly visible in the foreground below the water table, a large temnospondyl. Image Credit: Ghedoghedo/Wikipedia A 236-million-year-old fossil from Argentina may have provided the earliest evidence yet that an animal on the evolutionary lineage leading to mammals…
Avocado (single and halved). Image Credit: Ivar Leidus/Wikipedia Avocados growing in Nicaragua may carry a remarkable record of ancient human migration across the Americas. A new study published in ‘Plants, People, Planet’ has found that several avocado varieties growing in Nicaragua are genetically distinct from the commercial varieties commonly found today and are more closely…
Hawaii’s native Hawaiian stilt, known as aeʻo, has made a remarkable recovery after decades of population decline pushed the bird to roughly 200 individuals in the 1940s. Habitat loss, hunting and introduced predators had severely affected the long-legged wetland bird. More than five decades of legal protection, wetland restoration, predator control and monitoring have since…
Prairie dog, Image: AI Generated The black-footed ferret is North America’s rarest mammal, with only about 300 estimated to survive in the wild at the end of 2015. The species has been listed as endangered since 1967, and its survival is closely tied to prairie dogs, which provide almost all of its food as well…
