Category: Science & Tech

Climate change is not only pushing species to the brink of extinction, it is erasing a vast proportion of the ‘evolutionary history’ of the world’s flowering plants’ — or how these organisms relate to one another on the tree of life, which changes over time. No less than a fifth (21 %) of the world’s...

“Cloudy with a chance of rain” — imagine astronomers turning into meteorologists and issuing weather reports like this, but for alien planets. According to a new study published in Science on May 21, scientists were able to use the NASA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to peer closely at an exoplanet nearly 700 lightyears away,...

A: The earth’s outer core is a voluminous liquid layer that lies around 2,800 km beneath the surface. This hot, churning sea is filled with molten iron and nickel. As the outer core moves constantly, it acts like a large generator, creating the planet’s magnetic field, which shields the earth from harmful solar radiation. Researchers...

When doctors express scepticism about whole-body scanning, a predictable counter-argument surfaces on social media within hours. Physicians, the theory goes, have a vested interest in keeping you undiagnosed. Healthy patients don’t fill hospital beds. Early detection threatens the treatment economy and the doctor is the last person you should trust to tell you whether to...

Domestic dogs have significantly smaller brains than their wolf ancestors. Researchers have long known that dogs’ brains shrank in the past, but when has been a mystery. Some theories also argue that strict aesthetic standards and intensive, selective modern breeding over the last 200 years could have been the cause. In a new study, researchers...

Matter can become energy. You might have seen this in the film Oppenheimer or in videos of nuclear explosions. Just as the nuclei fuse, a blinding light fills the air and sky, so bright that simply closing your eyelids does not help. Physics allows physicists to do the opposite as well: to create matter from...

For most of the last two centuries, we have not had to think much about electricity. At the start of this period, we were just beginning to understand what it was. And towards the end, climate change and renewable energy has rendered it a constant thought in our minds. But for many decades in between,...

The recent success of Ensitrelvir at preventing COVID-19 is a milestone in a drug quest that began with a singular development at the start of the pandemic. In January 2020, the full-length genome sequence of a strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was posted on an online discussion forum for virologists. The sequence revealed that SARS-CoV-2,...