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Microwave ovens harbour a thriving bacterial community adapted to surviving the extreme conditions, according to a new study in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology. The microbiomes in some microwaves are similar to those found on solar panelsThe authors propose this is due to constant thermal shock, electromagnetic radiation, and desiccation (extreme drying) selecting for highly […]

Children and young people around the world have increased their sugary drink consumption by 23% in the last 3 decades, according to a new study. The study by US and Canadian researchers, is published in The BMJ. The researchers found that, from 1990 to 2018, people aged between 3-19 increased their sugar-sweetened beverage intake from […]

Researchers at Melbourne’s RMIT University have put the aerodynamics of kestrels to the test in the hope of gaining useful insight in the development of safer small aircraft design. The research is published in the Journal of Experimental Biology. Kestrels are a small bird of prey with a unique hunting method. They hover almost completely […]

Below the Earth’s crust is our planet’s thickest layer, the mantle, which influences many processes – such as volcanism, crust formation, and its magnetic field. It is so deep, 6km to 70km below the surface, that accessing mantle rock is extremely difficult. As a result, scientists know little about it. In 2023, scientists drilled more […]

It’s estimated that between 8,000–12,000 lions and other big cats, including tigers, are bred and kept in captivity in more than 350 private, commercial facilities across South Africa. A new Nature Conservation paper is urging the South African government to shut down this controversial captive lion industry. Researchers from the animal welfare organisation World Animal […]

Scientists have found 11 previously unidentified marine species – by coming up with a better way to describe them. The research, published in the Biodiversity Data Journal, aims to tackle the fact that it can take decades before species are named and described. Meanwhile, species are going extinct at record rates due to increased pressures […]

New research in India has found fishing impacts the fish that live to tell the tale, not just the ones that get caught. Male squaretail groupers (Plectropomus areolatus) are being scared away from their territories off the Lakshadweep archipelago, located north of the Maldives, by humans deliberately targeting spawning sites for fishing. The resulting behavioural […]

The Great Barrier Reef is warmer than it’s been in at least 400 years, according to a new analysis. The temperatures recorded on the reef in early 2024, which brought a mass bleaching event, are the hottest it’s been since 1618 by a wide margin. The next 5 hottest extremes on the reef have all […]

The International Space Station (ISS) has been orbiting above our heads for nearly 26 years. There are plans to decommission it in 2031, which has sparked a race for scientists understand the “microsociety” aboard the ISS before it is lost forever. The International Space Station Archaeological Project (ISAAP) is the first archaeological study outside of […]

Australian researchers have equipped sea lions with underwater cameras to map previously unexplored areas of the ocean floor. In Australia – and the world – ocean seabeds and the surrounding benthic habitats remain shrouded in mystery. Remotely operated robots can gather ocean floor data, but they are expensive, require certain weather conditions and are difficult […]

Researchers have designed a new kind of transmitter-receiver which could send entangled photons over an optical fibre. The concept could see a future “quantum internet” merged with current telecommunications technologies. Quantum internet could see the strange effect of quantum entanglement be used to make uncrackable encryption. Not even quantum computers – themselves still in the […]

Dogs are prone to small brain behaviour – it’s a phenomenon documented extensively, and hilariously, on social media. Domestic dogs’ (Canis familiaris) brains are physically more than 24% smaller than their ancestor the grey wolf (Canis lupis). It’s long been thought that the comforts of a cushy life of domestication led to exceptionally dramatic reductions […]

An extremely rare ancient human fossil has been found on the Indonesian island of Flores which could change our understanding of hominin evolution in Southeast Asia. The 700,000-year-old bone is from an adult. But its total length would have been only a little more than 20 centimetres long and has the smallest minimum circumference of […]

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has provided the first direct measurement of electron- and muon-neutrino interaction rates. The interactions have the highest neutrino energy ever detected from a human-generated source and could help answer fundamental questions about the universe including why there is more matter than antimatter. The results are published in Physical Review Letters. […]

A team of US researchers has developed an AI algorithm that can spot clinically significant prostate cancer on MRI scans. The researchers say that the deep learning model could help radiologists to detect the cancer. They’ve published their findings in Radiology. Prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers in the world, with the […]

Scientists have isolated a chemical in mouse brains that mediates the decision to eat or exercise. The chemical orexin, which also mediates sleep, prompted mice to choose exercise over a snack more frequently. The Swiss researchers say that their findings could help to advance research in promoting exercise among humans. The team has published its […]

Scientists have figured out a way to measure soil moisture by detecting the vibrations of traffic noise travelling through the ground. The technique is called distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) and it is normally used to measure seismic waves during earthquakes. Seismological instruments have never been used to measure soil moisture at such a large scale […]

Fossils have provided more evidence that Greenland’s ice sheet is more transient than previously thought, raising concerns for sea-level rise. The fossilised organic matter, found at the bottom of an ice core, indicates that the centre of Greenland was ice-free at some point in the last million years. This suggests the ice sheet is “fragile”, […]

Nearly 5,000 years ago, ancient Egyptians revolutionised the way in which humans shape the world around them. A new paper published in the PLOS ONE journal explains that ancient Egyptians probably became the world’s first hydraulics engineers to do this. The research centres on the oldest of Egypt’s iconic pyramids: the funerary complex of King […]

A new species has been identified from a 514-million-year-old fossil found in China’s southern Yunnan province. Shishania aculeata is an ancient slug with a twist. Its fossils reveal that the world’s earliest molluscs were armoured creatures. Unlike the snails of today, however, these early molluscs didn’t have shells. Research published in the journal Science shows […]

A technology that dates back thousands of years could dramatically reduce the need for batteries and other renewable energy storage technologies, according to US researchers. Firebricks are heat-absorbing bricks which emerged in the early Bronze Age, around 4000-3000 BCE. They were first used to line kilns, and have since been used in furnaces. They are […]

Blowflies carry bird flu virus New research has identified a potential new transmission route for bird flu – blowflies of the genus Calliphora. Japanese scientists collected blowflies near a wild crane colony in Izumi city, Kagoshima Prefecture, during an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza. Of the 648 blowflies collected, 14 were found to be carrying […]

In the last few years, Australia has faced both flooding rains and some of the lowest rainfall on record. Now, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences have the data that explains why rain in Australia has seemed so unpredictable. The researchers have shown that human-induced climate warming is driving increases in rainfall variability over 75% of the […]

A quantum state in a lab has produced something which is mathematically indistinguishable from a phenomenon only ever witnessed when black holes collide: gravitational waves. Gravitational waves were predicted by Einstein in 1916 as the “ripples” of space-time caused by massive cosmic events such as black hole collisions. It was not until 2015 before gravitational […]