Mars is currently being blasted with a dust storm the likes of which we’ve rarely seen. And at 1:30 pm EDT (5:30 pm UTC) this Wednesday, NASA will let us know just how this weather event will affect their ongoing operations. A week ago the storm was 18 million square kilometres (7 million square miles)
It might sound like an excuse for a bad hair day, but Uncombable Hair Syndrome (UHS) is actually a real genetic condition. It’s caused by a rare genetic mutation, and creates silvery-blond or straw-coloured hair that is easily damaged and cannot be combed flat. The result? Frizzy, shiny hair that sticks out in all directions. Some
It was a Saturday, and Laura Murray was a 10-year-old girl hanging out with her nanny outside her family’s Cincinnati townhouse. Her mother, giddy with excitement, handed the little girl a small glass vial filled with light-gray dust. It was from the Moon, her mother told her. Along with it was a handwritten note: “To
Particles collected from Earth’s upper atmosphere, originally deposited by comets, are older than our Solar System, scientists say – and these fine bits of interstellar dust could teach us about how planets and stars form from the very beginning. These cosmic particles have lived through at least 4.6 billion years and travelled across incredible distances,
The source of a mysterious microwave glow detected across our galaxy eluded astronomers for decades. But now a crack team has finally pinpointed the source: nanoscopic particles of crystalline carbon, otherwise known as diamond dust. There are several environments across the Milky Way that produce a faint glow known as anomalous microwave emission (AME). Scientists
As President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un have conducted a meeting in Singapore, it’s worth remembering a key impetus for the summit: North Korea can likely strike anywhere in the US with its nuclear weapons. In July and November, North Korea test-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, that can reportedly deliver nuclear warheads to targets
Scientists studying the skulls of long-dead Incas have made a startling discovery: the patients somehow had twice the survival rate after skull surgery than those operated on during the American Civil War – some 400 years later. This flies in the face of western notions of technical superiority, and contradicts previous assumptions that the technology
For centuries – millennia even – they’ve towered over the savannah like giants from another world, but their long, almost immortal watch is at last beginning to fade. The African baobab, the largest and longest-living tree among all angiosperm (flowering) plants, is in the midst of a deadly crisis, with new research finding several of
Remember Elon Musk’s Not-A-Flamethrower – a propane-fuelled, oversized barbecue starter that looks more like a modified Nerf gun? It might have been a joke when Musk first posted about it on Instagram in January, but it got deadly serious when 20,000 people pre-ordered it. On Saturday, the first wave of 1,000 people have received their
Hunger is a complex thing. We’ve all heard of the term ‘hangry’ – when something as simple as skipping a meal can change your mood from pleasant into irrationally cranky. But, as new research shows, ‘hanger’ might be more complicated than just a drop in blood sugar, and according to the researchers, it appears to
NASA has suspended science operations on its brave little Mars rover, Opportunity, as a huge dust storm rages over its location in the planet’s Perseverance Valley. First detected by NASA on June 1, the storm has worsened over the weekend, the intense dust darkening the sky over Mars and leaving Opportunity in the dark. And
You’d think that in the age of the internet, where more information than we can possibly consume in several lifetimes is at our fingertips, stubborn myths from the past would die away. But who among us still thinks the Great Wall of China is visible from space, and that it’s a bad idea to pick
At work, a calendar filled with meetings and deadlines often dictates the cadence of our days. But despite what tightly timed agendas might try to insist, our internal body clocks are secretly running the show. Scientists call this personalised daily pattern of sleep and wakefulness a circadian rhythm. Whether you know it or not, our bodies have a
In an exciting first, Indian scientists have discovered a sub-Saturn exoplanet orbiting a Sun-like star around 600 light-years away. The planet has been named EPIC 211945201b or K2-236b and it’s big – around 27 times more massive than Earth. The find sees India join a small group of countries to have confirmed a planet outside our
In life it often pays to keep a close eye on competitors and rivals. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals, tells how US president Abraham Lincoln persuaded each of his political rivals to join his cabinet, thereby turning them into his allies. But the formation of alliances with potential competitors is not unique
During the 1970s, astronomer became aware of a massive radio source at the center of our galaxy that they later realized was a Supermassive Black Hole (SMBH) – which has since been named Sagittarius A*. And in a recent survey conducted by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers discovered evidence for hundreds or even thousands of black holes located in
When you first start dating someone, at least one of your friends will tell you to “play it cool.” It’s a piece of advice that’s almost as old as dating itself, and it’s based on the idea that if you act like you’re not really eager for the relationship, you suddenly become irresistible. According to
Every second, millions of emails, clicks, and searches happen via the world wide web with such fluidity that the internet seems almost omnipresent. As such, people often mistakenly assume that internet traffic happens by air – our mobile devices, after all, aren’t wired to anything. But satellites carry less than 1 percent of human interactions,
In 1999, radiologist Nicola Strickland went on a holiday to the Caribbean island of Tobago, a tropical paradise complete with idyllic, deserted beaches. On her first morning there, she went foraging for shells and corals in the white sand, when the holiday quickly took a turn for the worse. Scattered amongst the coconuts and mangoes
By the age of three or four, we all start to lie. At this point in our brain’s development, we learn that we have an incredibly versatile and powerful tool at our disposal – our language – and we can use it to actually play with reality and affect the outcome of what’s happening. Sooner