Are we alone in the universe? There are good reasons to suspect that we have company.After all, the universe is exceptionally large, with possibly billions of Earth-like planets in our Milky Way galaxy, which is but one of trillions of galaxies in the universe.The ingredients for life, as far as we know, are common. And humans on Earth have proven life is capable of evolving to a point of technological complexity which could make our presence visible to anyone out there looking.But could we reco ...read more

The release of Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s sprawling study of the man known as “the father of the atomic bomb,” has propelled the world-shifting work of a scientist to cinema’s front stage. Tracking the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer through his time as director of the Manhattan Project and beyond, the film explores the complexities of its protagonist’s character and conscience alongside the thorny union of science and morality.5 Movies About ScientistsIf that tangled, three-hour ...read more

Titanosaurs, a diverse group of long-necked sauropod dinosaurs, were found on every continent, including Antarctica, in their Cretaceous heyday. They lived right up until the end of all other non-bird dinosaurs, when the Chicxulub asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula about 66 million years ago.Paleontologists have discovered dozens of distinct titanosaurs, many of them relatively recently in fossil beds in South America. Nearly all of the group are massive, but like other sauropods, these giant ...read more

Science has long accepted that people are affected by their social environment – a term researchers use to describe day-to-day surroundings, interactions and stresses. For example, people with money, a robust social life and access to safe outdoor spaces are often going to have better long-term health outcomes than those without. Our four-legged friends, whose lives in many ways mirror our own, are also thought to be influenced by their social environment. But the specifics of how and why have ...read more

The divine blend of spices needed to make curry first reached Southeast Asia about 2,000 years ago, when the region began trading with the Indian subcontinent, according to an analysis of ancient spice residue.The new project analyzed 12 different spice grinding tools unearthed at the ancient trading port of Oc Eo, in modern-day Vietnam, by washing them with water and chemicals. This produced hundreds of tiny fragments that the researchers painstakingly identified (to a reasonable degree of cert ...read more

King Charles III, who assumed the throne of the United Kingdom in 2022 upon the death of Queen Elizabeth II, has a reputation as an environmental activist. What's more, some political commentators see his reign as an opportunity to enact the large-scale change needed to fight global warming. When he first entered public life at age 20, the then-Prince of Wales used his celebrity to sound the alarm. “Conservation or problems about pollution should not be held up as separate concepts from housin ...read more

With forty wild feline species scattered across the globe, cats boast an array of adaptations that allow them to thrive in some of Earth’s harshest environments. Here, we marvel at some of the extremes of the cat world – smallest, fluffiest and more – and see what evolution has done with these magnificent mammals. 1. Cheetah: The Speed Demon(Credit: Elana Erasmus/Shutterstock)Holding the records for the world's fastest cat and fastest land animal, cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus) can reach spee ...read more

Natural disasters, such as tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, floods and volcanic eruptions, have caused devastating effects. However, human-caused disasters can have equally devastating impacts on the lives of countless people. Here are five of the biggest human-caused disasters to occur in modern history. 1. Chernobyl Disaster(Credit:JoRanky/Shutterstock)In 1986, an explosion at the Number 4 nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant released massive amounts of radioactive ...read more

Who was this girl, and why was her burial so special?Those are the questions archaeologist Hala Alarashi and her colleagues ask in a new paper published in PLOSONE that details the burial of an 8-year-old girl in an ancient Jordanian town sometime between 7,400 and 6,800 B.C. Interred with her bones in the village of Ba‘ja, they found the piecemeal remains of some sort of intricate jewelry that had no precedent at this point in neolithic history.“The making of the necklace appears to have in ...read more

Click-clack, click-clack! It’s a sound that many of us may have heard whenever our dogs walk or run across any surface that isn’t carpeted. If you have hardwood, your first thought might be, I hope he didn’t scratch my floors! But instead of worrying about that, maybe your first thought should be, is it time to clip my dog’s nails?The answer is probably yes. For many dogs, when their claws are so long that you can hear them tap-tap-tapping across any hard surface in the house, it’s oft ...read more