Category Science

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Imagine a photograph of your great-grandparents, grandparents and parents side by side. You’d see a resemblance, but each generation would look distinct from…

Planting forests while growing protein-rich food seems like a win-win, so are there any potential drawbacks? Lynne Boddy, professor of fungal ecology at Cardiff University, believes that mycoforestry “absolutely” has the potential to produce significant food crops while sequestering carbon.…

Saturn and its rings, as imaged by the Cassini spacecraft in 2016 NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute The rings of Saturn could be much older than previously thought and may have formed around the same time as the planet, according to a…

Beer is best served cold, and it turns out that math can help with that. Cláudio de Castro Pellegrini of the Federal University of São João del-Rei in Brazil recently set out to formulate an equation to determine the optimal…

Anthony Fauci became a household name during the COVID pandemic. But the genially stubborn infectious disease doctor, who spent decades helming one the U.S. government’s most important medical research institutes, had made his mark well before that. Born and raised…

Eerie events often have mundane explanations Luciano De Polo Stokkete/Alamy I had a strange experience in a cafe recently. When paying for coffee, I asked to use the toilet. After I tapped my PIN into the card reader, the barista…

December 16, 2024 3 min read The 6 Most Hilarious Things We Learned about Animals in 2024 From a comb jelly with two butts to wing-slapping ants, this animal research made us laugh this year By Andrea Thompson Ken Griffiths/Alamy…

An adult skull from the Charterhouse Warren mass grave in the UK, featuring cut marks and a blunt force fracture Ian R. Carwright/Institute of Archaeology Oxford University Around 4000 years ago, at least 37 men, woman and children were brutally…

The vampire-like Hylomys macarong hedgehog Alexei V. Abramov An extraordinary 234 new species were described by scientists in the Greater Mekong region of South-East Asia in 2023. The finds, announced in a report from conservation organisation WWF, include 173 species…

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. For thousands of years, if you wanted to send a secret message, there was basically one way to do it. You’d scramble the message using a special rule, known only…