don

In The Year 2080, Your City Will Feel Like It’s 500 Miles Away

by

When you’re older, your home town will feel different. That’s true for everybody. But for people living today, the changes will be impossible to ignore. We usually measure climate change in terms of rising temperatures. But scientists say there’s another way of thinking about it: spatial displacement.   In a study from 2019, researchers found … Read more

Scientists Solve The Century-Old Mystery of Why This Special Insect Can Float in Water

by

Apart from fish, scientists have found only one other animal that can regulate its buoyancy in the water using swim bladders, and it’s probably not what you were expecting. The phantom midge is a type of lake fly (genus Chaoborus), but before it can take to the air, its larvae must first grow up in the … Read more

Jaw-Dropping View of The Milky Way Reveals Mysterious Structures Dangling in Space

by

A new image of the heart of the Milky Way is revealing mysterious structures we’ve never seen before. Taken using the ultra-sensitive MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa, the images show nearly 1,000 strands of magnetic filaments, measuring up to 150 light-years in length, in surprisingly neat and regular arrangements.   That’s 10 times the … Read more

The Weirdest Eyes in The Animal Kingdom See a World We Can’t Imagine

by

When you view the world a certain way, it’s easy to forget not everyone has the same vision. We do mean that quite literally. Aside from philosophical considerations of the subjective experience of color, different organisms have evolved to view the world differently, with eye structures and configurations optimized for various kinds of existence.   … Read more

Astronomers Detect Up to 170 Rogue Planets Hurtling Aimlessly Through Space

by

Interstellar space is a graveyard of lost souls. Adrift far from any star, these planets float in the darkness like ghost ships in the night. Catching sight of one requires patience, and a good eye. But a new approach based on tens of thousands of images collected by the European Southern Observatory’s facilities has resulted … Read more

Physicists Claim They’ve Quantum Entangled a Tardigrade With a Qubit. But Have They?

by

A team of physicists claims to have entangled a superconducting qubit and a tardigrade, moving the freezing, tiny, and well-controlled world of quantum into the “hot and wet” systems of life.   However, the results described in this preprint paper are not quite so cut and dried, and many quantum researchers are arguing that the … Read more