Science

Thomas Szasz (Image: Wikipedia) Say what you actually think and someone will call you opinionated. Keep your views to yourself and someone else will say you lack conviction. Thomas Szasz, the Hungarian-American psychiatrist known for challenging almost every accepted idea in his own field, summed up that impossible bind in one line. “If you have…

Quote of the day by Marie Curie (AI-generated image) Marie Curie wrote this to her brother Joseph on the eighteenth of March, 1894, years before radium, before either of her Nobel Prizes, while she was still a struggling student in Paris. “Life is not easy for any of us,” she wrote. “But what of that?…

Humans Fed Salmon to Canines 12,000 Years Ago, Study Suggests, Hinting at the Origin of Our Relationship With Dogs Early humans in Alaska were sharing their salmon catches with ancient canines 12,000 years ago. This shows that close relationships between humans and dog ancestors developed 2,000 years earlier than anyone previously thought in the Americas.The…

Concorde flew so high that it was forced to carry a radiation meter to track dangerous cosmic storms British-French supersonic jet Concorde flew so close to the edge of space that it had to carry a special radiation meter to monitor dangerous cosmic storms. If the cockpit instrument sounded an alarm, the only way pilots…

Scientists say crushing deep-ocean pressure squeezes hidden nutrients out of sinking marine snow, feeding microbes and changing what we know about Earth’s carbon cycle (Representational AI image) Life in the deepest parts of the ocean may have access to more food than scientists once believed. A new study has found that the huge pressure found…

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope images of the Crab Nebula Nearly 1,000 years after people first saw a bright new star appear in the sky, scientists have measured how the remains of that explosion are still expanding today.In July 1054, court astronomers in China recorded a bright “guest star” near Tianguan, now known as Zeta Tauri….

In the Indian state of Rajasthan, authorities have excavated a 28km artificial lake to line it with plastic and separate it from sand. Behind this lies the mission to supply water to 5 million people living in the cities of Jaisalmer and Barmer in the state. A reservoir in the Thar Desert The Thar Desert…

For more than 5,300 years, it lay undisturbed beneath a Stone Age tomb in northern Spain, hidden among the remains of nearly 100 people. When archaeologists finally uncovered the ancient skull, they expected another glimpse into prehistoric life. Instead, they found evidence of something far more extraordinary. Careful examination revealed that the woman had undergone…

A school science project has turned into an award-winning innovation for 17-year-old Edward Kang, a student from New Jersey who developed an artificial intelligence tool capable of screening for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) by analysing retinal images. Called RetinaMind, the experimental AI examines photographs of the back of the eye to…

Every living organism inherits a unique combination of traits, from eye colour and blood type to resistance against certain diseases. These characteristics are determined by genes, but genes themselves can exist in different forms. These alternative versions are known as alleles. While one allele may produce a particular trait, another may result in a different…