Bumblebees have tiny brains but they can solve problems like chimps and elephants - NPR
New research suggests the fuzzy insects may be capable of spontaneously solving problems the way animals with much larger brains do.
Ancient Chinese medicine could transform hair loss treatment - ScienceDaily
A traditional Chinese medicinal root used for over a thousand years is attracting new scientific attention for its potential to combat hair loss. Studies suggest Polygonum multiflorum can block harmful hormones, activate hair-growth signals, protect follicles…
The James Webb telescope keeps finding early galaxies that look brighter, bigger and more mature than astronomers expected, forcing researchers to rethink how quickly the first galaxies formed stars and assembled after the Big Bang. - Space Daily
The James Webb Space Telescope has confirmed MoM-z14, the most distant spectroscopically confirmed galaxy yet, whose light left it about 280 million years after the Big Bang. It is one of a growing population of early galaxies that are brighter and more numer…
The largest insects that ever lived were dragonflies with wingspans of more than two feet, grown in an ancient atmosphere so much richer in oxygen that nothing that size could survive in the air we breathe today - Space Daily
The largest insect known to science was a predator called Meganeuropsis permiana, with a wingspan of about 71 centimetres, a little over two feet. It flew in the Early Permian, roughly 285 million years ago, and despite the way it is usually described, it was…
In 1959, the Soviet Luna 3 probe swung around the far side of the Moon and took 29 grainy photographs of a hemisphere humans had never seen, then developed the film onboard and scanned the negatives with a flying-spot beam to radio them back across - Space Daily
In October 1959, the Soviet Luna 3 probe took the first photographs of the Moon's far side, developed the film in a tiny onboard darkroom, and scanned the prints to radio them back to Earth — a chain of engineering improbabilities that redrew the map of the s…
The International Space Station circles the planet so fast that the crew watch the sun rise and set sixteen times in a single day, a new dawn roughly every ninety minutes - Space Daily
The International Space Station travels fast enough that its crew pass through sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets in the course of a single day. At an altitude of roughly 400 kilometres it moves at about 28,000 kilometres an hour, which works out to one ful…
NASA interested in Hubble reboost if costs can be reduced - SpaceNews
As NASA prepares an attempt to reboost an astronomy spacecraft in a decaying orbit, the agency is open to doing something similar for Hubble.
There are millions of objects in our own solar system that have never been seen and the facility that will find them is now just months from starting its decade-long survey - Space Daily
Somewhere on the ridge of Cerro Pachón in northern Chile, a telescope with an 8.4-metre mirror is in the final stages of preparation for the most comprehensive survey of the solar system ever attempted. The NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory completed its cons…
Largest scorpion ever grew to over three-feet long and had six-inch pinchers, according to nightmare-inducing study - New York Post
It’s the scorpion king.
Chemists have demonstrated for the first time how RNA may have copied itself on early Earth — solving a bottleneck that had blocked the origin-of-life field for decades - Space Daily
A paper published in Nature Chemistry in May 2025 describes what its authors call the first demonstration of exponential RNA replication by a polymerase ribozyme under conditions that could plausibly have occurred on the early Earth. The work comes from Dr Ja…
Mount Etna eruptions reveal carbon dioxide and water can trigger separate explosive paths - Phys.org
The plumbing systems of volcanoes are vast and complex. But they aren't consistent, even in the same volcano. A Cornell-led collaboration found very different mechanisms behind two historic eruptions of Mount Etna in Italy. Understanding these dynamics—combin…
Predictive surrogates could cut quantum computing measurement overhead by more than 99.97% - Phys.org
Quantum computers, systems that process information leveraging quantum mechanical effects, have the potential of outperforming classical computers on some tasks. Despite their potential, the use of these systems remains very limited, due to their high cost an…
Why the years seem to speed up as we age, and how focusing on one thing might make time feel slower again - Space Daily
In the 19th century, a French philosopher called Paul Janet proposed that time appears to accelerate by the proportion of life already lived. A year for a ten-year-old is one-tenth of everything they know. The same year for a forty-year-old is one-fortieth. T…
After massive die-off of sea stars, biologist sees a surprising ‘baby boom’ - The Washington Post
Sea stars almost went extinct along the West Coast a decade ago. Recently, they have been making a comeback.
Parker Solar Probe has flown through the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, where temperatures soar into the millions of degrees even though the visible surface below is far cooler — one of the strangest long-running puzzles in solar physics. - Space Daily
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has spent the past few years flying repeatedly through the Sun’s corona, the outer atmosphere where temperatures run to more than a million degrees Celsius while the visible surface below sits at about 5,500. On 24 December 2024 it c…
NASA's James Webb Discovers That 3I/ATLAS Let One Rip as It Passed Through Solar System - Futurism
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope "sniffed methane" from interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, roughly two months after its perihelion.
China wants to build the world’s largest astronomy base on Saishiteng Mountain - South China Morning Post
Telescopes at the remote site are set to surpass Hawaii’s Mauna Kea in light-gathering power by the mid-2030s, scientists say.
Scientists Discover Hidden Symmetry on Earth That Nobody Can Explain - 404 Media
The north-south albedo symmetry may be fading as both hemispheres get darker.
"Its lethal toxins rapidly interfere with nerve function, locking muscles & shutting down vital processes." Despite its beauty it's one deadly shell - BBC Wildlife Magazine
Is this the world’s deadliest beach souvenir?
Scientists have discovered that air filters can capture DNA floating in the atmosphere and it can identify wildlife, viruses, and even plants linked to drugs nearby - Space Daily
The air above Dublin contains, among other things, genetic traces of cannabis, poppy, and magic mushrooms. Not the substances themselves, but fragments of their DNA, shed from plants, carried on particles, and pulled out of the atmosphere by a standard air fi…