Science

Named after the formidable carapace that shields its head and upper body, T. australiensis can grow up to 7.6 cm long, and it uses its long, segmented tail and mass of 60 or so legs to propel itself through shallow water. The crustaceans known as shield shrimp have cropped up in temporary pools and water-filled clay pans across Central Australia ... Read More »

Ruby seadragon, scientific name Phyllopteryx dewysea, has been captured in video off the coast of Australia. This elusive creature is the cousin of the common seadragon and the leafy seadragon but has no extravagant appendages. Video footage of the ruby seadragon, captured using a remotely operated vehicle with a low-light video camera, shows off its intense red colour and reveals ... Read More »

Researchers are still trying to track down the exact location of the elusive Planet Nine – the hypothesised ninth planet of our Solar System that was proposed by scientists in January last year. But while they’re at it, new research has offered up an explanation for how this huge and mysterious world could have come to orbit our Sun in ... Read More »

A father captured stunning images of a rare natural phenomenon which makes it look as though multicoloured laser beams are shooting down from the sky. The extraordinary images were taken in Ontario by Timmy Joe Elzinga using his smartphone camera. Elzinga was woken up on the early morning of January 6 by his son, Gibson, when he saw this crazy ... Read More »

Wild vampire bats have been found feeding on humans in Brazil for the first time – and they could be spreading disease. Scientists from the Federal University of Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil, led by Enrico Bernard, analysed 70 faeces samples from a colony of vampire bats, named Diphylla ecudata, that reside in Catimbau National Park in northeast Brazil. They also ... Read More »

While many animals become less fertile as they age, only three species—humans, pilot whales, and killer whales—have females that regularly live well beyond their reproductive prime. These are the only species where we see grandmas acting like grandmas: they’ve long stopped producing offspring of their own, so they pivot to helping care for their children’s children. According to a new ... Read More »

A team of MIT scientists have designed a new 3D graphene configuration. The team was able to compress and fuse together flakes of graphene to make a sponge-like configuration that is both strong and lightweight. In its two-dimensional form, graphene is thought to be the strongest of all known materials. But researchers until now have had a hard time translating ... Read More »

Scientists’ analysis of the monkeys’ grunts, barks, ‘wahoos’, ‘yaks’ and copulation calls could have major implications for the evolution of language. Scientists from the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Grenoble Alpes University, both in France, and their colleagues recorded baboons in captivity, finding the animals were capable of producing five distinct sounds that have the same characteristic frequencies ... Read More »

A bumblebee is now on the endangered species list for the first time in a “race against extinction,” the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Tuesday. This is the first bumblebee designated an endangered species, and the first bee put on the list from the 48 contiguous United States — seven species of bee in Hawaii were named as endangered ... Read More »

The Chilean navy has admitted it can’t explain a video filmed by its pilots showing a “UFO” in the country’s airspace. The video, captured on November 11, 2014 in the coastal sector between the port of San Antonio and Quinteros, was shot from a Chilean Navy helicopter and shows an unknown object flying forward at a speed similar to that ... Read More »

A skeleton from the outskirts of what was once the ancient city of Troy, has yielded the genome of an 800 year old mystery infection. Scientists at McMaster’s Ancient DNA Centre and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have sequenced the complete genomes of two forms of bacteria found in tissue samples dating back to the 13th century. They were collected from ... Read More »