For most of the twentieth century, the story of how humans arrived in North America felt settled. They came from Siberia, crossed a land bridge called Beringia, moved south as the ice sheets retreated, and by around 13,000 years ago had given rise to the Clovis culture, the earliest widely accepted evidence of human presence […]
Getting to the moon is expensive. Every kilogram of fuel that a spacecraft carries has to be lifted off Earth, which itself burns more fuel. This is why aerospace engineers and orbital mechanics researchers spend enormous amounts of time hunting for even the smallest efficiencies in how a spacecraft travels. A few meters per second […]
JOHANNESBURG: When South African infectious disease specialist Lucille Blumberg checked her email on the morning of May 1, while the country was celebrating the Labour Day holiday, an urgent message caught her attention.A UK-based colleague, who monitors diseases in remote British overseas territories in the South Atlantic Ocean, had written about a passenger from a […]
Ancient Egyptians ingeniously utilized a forgotten, high-volume Nile branch, the Khufu Branch, to transport massive pyramid stones. Image credit: Chatgpt If you’ve spent any time on TikTok or history subreddits, you’ve definitely seen the wild theories on how the Great Pyramid of Giza was built. Aliens, lost future civilisations, complicated sound-wave levitation- people will believe […]
Scientists at King’s College London have developed an experimental bone-healing material made from sheep wool that could one day offer a sustainable alternative to collagen in regenerative medicine. The research focused on keratin, a structural protein naturally found in wool, hair, and nails. In laboratory and animal tests, the wool-derived material successfully supported bone regeneration […]
For most people, water is harmless, even comforting. It cools the body on hot days, washes away dirt, and makes up nearly 60 percent of the human body itself. But for a tiny number of people around the world, contact with water can trigger painful, itchy hives within minutes. The condition, known as Aquagenic urticaria, […]
A quiet moment inside a digital archive search has led to something that experts are calling a major literary breakthrough. Researchers studying a medieval manuscript in Rome reportedly stumbled upon what appears to be the oldest surviving English poem. The discovery was not made during an excavation or field study, but through digitised pages viewed […]
In a discovery that feels almost unreal, scientists have revived a microscopic organism that had been frozen in Siberian permafrost for around 24,000 years. The tiny creature, often referred to in media reports as a ‘zombie worm,’ was thought to be long dead. Instead, it returned to life in a laboratory setting and showed signs […]
The Universe keeps throwing up surprises, and black holes are right at the centre of it. The biggest ones detected so far do not seem to fit the usual story of how stars die. A new study reportedly suggests that these extreme objects might not form in a single collapse at all. Instead, they could […]
Beneath the extremely dry surface of Chile’s Atacama Desert, scientists discovered a functional community of microorganisms that challenges what we thought possible for life. While the ground above remains one of Earth’s harshest environments, a ‘hidden oasis’ lies about two meters down, protected from high solar irradiance and complete dryness. This underground community mainly consists […]
