For almost 60 years, the world’s most iconic radio telescope consisted of a 305-metre dish built into a natural sinkhole in Puerto Rico with a 900-tonne receiver suspended above. But on 1 December 2020, the receiver plummeted to the ground after its supporting cables snapped, destroying the dish. The US National Science Foundation, which runs the facility, had long been aware of the ageing observatory’s shortcomings. Indeed, it had closed the observatory and announced plans to demolish it. B ...read more

Hobbits are usually found feasting, drinking, gardening and destroying rings in Tolkien's fictional Middle-Earth. But in reality, ancient remains indicate that hobbit-sized humanoids once lived on the Indonesian island of Flores. While researchers found artifacts such as stone tools, there was no evidence of dark lords or broken swords. The ancient remains belonged to Homo floresiensis, also known as the Flores Hobbit or simply, hobbit. As more research goes into the Flores Hobbit, it leaves ...read more

About 250 million years ago, widespread volcanic eruptions changed the earth’s atmosphere and thus its climate, setting off “The Great Dying,” otherwise known as the Permian extinction. Some nine out of 10 species disappeared over the course of about a million years, during which herbivores and predators alike jockeyed for resources, including the formidable inostrancevia.A saber-toothed meat-eater that likely had tough skin like a rhino and ran on all fours, the inostrancevia was the larg ...read more

Most breeds of chicken go around barefoot, with no feathers on their talons. But a new study found a simple genetic method to reverse this, neatly transforming scales into something else. Even the smallest changes in gene expression can affect embryonic development.The researchers’ method, carried out through the so-called Sonic Hedgehog pathway, could also help explain how scaly dinosaurs eventually evolved into lineages of small, feathery birds.Egg CandlingThe study took 11-day-old incubatin ...read more

Mate Parica is an archaeologist from the University of Zadar in Croatia, and in 2021, he discovered the sunken settlement of Soline after spotting something strange off the coast of the famous Croatian island of Korcula, the reported birthplace of Marco Polo.After spotting the darkened shape, he thought, “Maybe it is natural, maybe not,” he later told Reuters.A specialist in underwater archaeology, Parica thought he’d spotted a manmade structure submerged off the island’s eastern coast, ...read more

The relationships you choose don’t just impact your mental health. The stress or happiness they cultivate also affects your long-term and short-term physical health. Researchers are finding that the quality of our relationships with our partners, family members and friends can be as important, or in some cases, more important, to human health than habits like smoking, diet, exercising and drinking alcohol. Humans are social beings meant to work together toward a common goal, and, as a result ...read more

Some dinosaurs feasted on smaller lizards, eggs or even early mammals. Others hunted other dinosaurs as prey, or scavenged the remains of dead animals. Most dinosaurs, though, ate plants. Research suggests more than 180 dinosaurs preferred a plant-based diet, but it’s quite hard to put a precise number on it, says Paul Barrett, a paleontology researcher at the Natural History Museum in London.“There's a little bit of a gray area because some of the dinosaurs that we think mainly ate plants m ...read more

Scientists are working to bring back a woolly mammoth-like species to roam the Earth’s tundra. A study published last year, however, complicates these efforts. Researchers at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm found that woolly mammoths lost nearly 100 genes as they evolved.Evolving Mammoth GenesLove Dalén, professor in evolutionary genomics at Stockholm University, explained that such alterations to genes can change pathways, which affect key traits.“From an evolutionary perspectiv ...read more