The amount of matter present in the universe simply hasn’t added up. Astronomers accounting for all the normal matter in the universe that makes up stars, galaxies, and gasses have fallen far short of the amount they should find produced by the Big Bang 13.6 billion years ago.About 85 percent of the universe is made up of dark matter. The remaining 15 percent is the more conventional kind — much of which builds the things we can see in space, like stars and planets. Of that, about half has b ...read more

Seeing human-like robots, dolls, and AI-generated faces can trigger eerie, put-off feelings towards the figure, a phenomenon known as the uncanny valley. Though these figures look almost human, there is just something slightly off about them. It could be the unblinking eyes, unnatural stillness, or — for AI-generated figures — poorly synced facial and lip movements. Recently, researchers from the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) in Bochum, Germany, have noticed AI-generated avata ...read more

Fire is one of the building blocks of human life. Whether for providing warmth, cooking food, casting light, or assisting in the creation of the first tools, fire has been responsible for much of the progress our ancestors made that helped modern humanity get to where we are today.If we want to make a fire, it’s simple. Grab some wood from the corner store, set it up in your backyard fire pit, and strike a match. But how did our Ice Age ancestors do it? There actually isn’t much in the archa ...read more

Dean Cliver, an expert in food microbiology at the University of California Davis, was the OG of cutting-board research. In the early 1990s, Cliver, who died in 2011, and his colleagues set out to discover how home cooks could clean their wooden cutting boards so that wooden boards would be as safe to use as the plastic variety. But the results of their experiments showed that the plastic boards weren’t necessarily safer than the wooden ones. Or to be more precise, under the same experimental ...read more

Patterns exist all around the world, creating unforgettable designs exhibited by organisms and acts of nature. Some of these designs even share surprising connections, like a spiral shape seen in both marine mollusks and a newly discovered structure of light that moves like a vortex. A recent study found that the movement of this light vortex — called an optical rotatum — occurs in a way that is very similar to the Fibonacci sequence, the mathematical concept behind many of nature’s most i ...read more

If one were to eat substances from blandest to nastiest, the bracket fungus, Amaropostia stiptica, would sit at the farthest end of the unpleasant spectrum.A team of scientists determined just what makes that particular fungus so aggressively distasteful, a group of researchers report in the Journal of Agricultural Food Chemistry. They identified a compound called oligoporin D in the bracket fungus that activates the human bitter taste receptor TAS2R46. The substance is so strong that even barel ...read more

About 100 million years ago, a previously unknown armored dinosaur wielding a clubbed tail lumbered through the Canadian Rockies. The species resembled the well-known ankylosaurus (Nodosaurid ankylosaurs) — but with two major differences. The first-ever identified footprints of this species sported only three toes (putting it into the ankylosaurid ankylosaurs category), instead of four (belonging to Tetrapodosaurus borealis). Also, the more known ankylosaurus swung its flexible tail to wield i ...read more

From the food we eat to the air we breathe, microplastics and their even smaller equivalent — nanoplastics — are just about everywhere. And while the body may expel some of the plastics we’ve consumed, there are still plenty that linger in our blood and organs, leading to other health issues. Recent research, as part of the FFG bridge project Nano-VISION, uses a new sensor platform that allows for a laser to be shone at clear, bodily fluids. Through this process, researchers can now deter ...read more

Pinpointing when animals became our companions is harder than it sounds. Every fossil find and genetic study tweaks what we think we know about the timeline or the circumstances under which domestication occurred. When it comes to cats, the story is still evolving. Scientists continue to debate where and how our feline friends first went from wild hunters to household companions.For a long time, ancient Egypt was thought to be the starting point — home of cat worship, divine felines, and famou ...read more

Key Take-Aways on Dark Oxygen: Dark oxygen is produced on the seafloor by a process other than photosynthesis.A new study published in Nature Geoscience in July 2024 suggests it’s unclear what causes dark oxygen, but a possible source could be polymetallic nodules.This discovery could rewrite our understanding of how aerobic (oxygen-respiring) life evolved on Earth. And it could even point to new possibilities for extraterrestrial life, perhaps on Saturn’s watery moons.The traditional story ...read more