Ireland and Britain should be, seismologically speaking, equally boring. The two islands lie thousands of kilometers from the nearest plate boundary and are not volcanic hot spots. But though the ground rarely rumbles in Ireland, neighboring Britain experiences plenty of weak and moderate earthquakes.The lithosphere—Earth’s outermost rocky veneer, which includes the crust and the solid upper mantle—is thicker and cooler beneath Ireland than it is beneath Britain, new research has suggeste ...read more

At first glance, the Earth’s orbit and oceans could not be more different. The former is located on the uppermost layers of the planet’s atmosphere and beyond, while the latter surrounds all the landmasses around the globe.But there is a glaring similarity between the two: Both are vast areas with no owner, making responsible and sustainable use of them incredibly challenging.Imogen Napper, a marine scientist at the University of Plymouth in England, says the high seas and the Earth’s orbi ...read more

Researchers have long used birdsong as a prime example when studying the complexities of speech. But a new study based on orangutans attempts to change that and shed some light on how humans acquired the ability to make more than one vocal sound at a time.The researchers spent a massive amount of time observing and recording the great apes in the wild – some 3,800 hours in Borneo and Sumatra within range of the animals. What they found connects present-day beatboxing sounds to early human lang ...read more

Back in October 2021, developers on the GitHub software development platform were given access to an exotic AI tool called Copilot. Created in association with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, Copilot uses the same generative AI technology to produce computer code on request, rather than text. And it is pretty good at it. Github reckons that Copilot successfully autocompletes coding suggestions about 50 percent of the time, which should significantly increase the productivity of the millions ...read more

Despite the seemingly-infinite vastness of the cosmos, Earth is the only place known to harbor life. As such, humans have long wondered whether our world is the only place where life has emerged — a process known as abiogenesis. A new study may offer some tantalizing clues. Planetary scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany showed that the metallicity of stars, or how much metal a star contains, is an important factor in our ongoing search for complex life ...read more

After choking New York City and other major metropolises on the U.S. East Coast a few weeks ago, wildfire smoke from Canadian wildfires is now blanketing the Midwest — and streaming all the way across the Atlantic to Europe. I got a first-hand look at the smoke while flying in and out of Chicago yesterday (June 27), where some of the worst air pollution levels among major world cities were recorded. (As was the case for Minneapolis and Detroit too.) Here’s a photo I took of the pall just aft ...read more

The term schizoid is used colloquially and often facetiously to mean something like “being of two minds about something” or “appearing to have more than one personality.” In psychiatry, however, the term is quite specific, and it definitely does not apply to your sister, who can’t make up her mind about where to go for lunch. The term is short for a condition known as “schizoid personality disorder.” But forget how we use schizoid; in some cases, disorder may not even be the rig ...read more

Gentoo penguins are the speediest swimming birds in the world. Thanks to their slick wings, the birds can reach speeds of up to 22 mph while searching for food. Now, because of a new study published in Physics of Fluids, researchers understand the mechanism behind their exceptional swimming ability and found that it’s all in the angle of their wings.By observing how penguins move and position their flippers underwater, researchers can use the findings to design aquatic vehicles without high ex ...read more

For thousands of years now, mammals have held dominion over the land. But it wasn’t always this way. According to a new paper, early mammals evolved before a massive asteroid hit the planet 66 million years ago and therefore lived briefly in the shadow of the dinosaurs.These hard-scrabble animals included the earliest relatives of humans, dogs, rabbits, cats and any mammal that gives birth with a placenta. They survived until an asteroid marked the end of the Cretaceous Period and the reign of ...read more

In North America, skinks are often tiny, slick and snakelike — with shiny blue tails or bright red heads. Nearly all of them can fit in the palm of your hand. But more than 47,000 years ago, an armored tank of a skink walked the desert lands of Australia.“It was nicknamed ‘megachunk’ or ‘chunksaurus,’” due to the thickness of its bones, says Kailah Thorn, a paleontologist at the Western Australia Museum who recently described the species for the first time. “It’s a pretty heavy ...read more