Oldest Known Dog Bone Hints Our Best Friends Were With Us Earlier Than Thought

Mark Laita, the host of the Soft White Underbelly youtube channel, is one of the first to highlight the Whittaker family. Mark first came to know the Whittaker family in 2004 while working on his book ¨Created Equal¨.

*This is a work of nonfiction based on actual events I experienced firsthand; used with permission. I was lining up to buy coffee at a cafe in Heathrow. Being the next in line to be served, the white cashier called the white guy behind me to serve him. I thought it was a mistake and started walking towards her. She insisted that the guy behind me goes first! Instead of going to be served, the sweet guy pointed at me and said to the cashier, “She’s next in line.” The guy refused to be served until I was served. We had lined up so well and was so sure there was no confusion as to who was first in line.

Nick Castro, who runs Nick’s Extreme Pest Control in California, has been in business for over 20 years but in all that time, he’s never encountered something quite like this.

The Sun gives life to our planet through its rays, and yet some fascinating lifeforms don't need light to live. Instead of using photosynthesis to store energy in their chemical bonds, some microbes rely purely on the oxidation of inorganic molecules like hydrogen to do the trick. Chemosynthesis, as it's known, was speculated as a potential source of energy for microbes in the 19th century, though wasn't confirmed until ecosystems surrounding deep ocean hydrothermal vents were discovered in the 1970s. Since then, the means of harvesting energy through the oxidation of inorganic compounds has been considered rare, confined to extreme habitats. But emerging research...

Scientists rattling normal frozen water around in a jar of ultracold steel balls have discovered a previously unknown form of ice, closer to liquid water than any other ice yet. This is amorphous ice, a form not found in nature on Earth. That's because its atoms are arranged not in...

Great Zimbabwe was the first major city in southern Africa, home to an estimated 18,000 people at its peak. Yet no one really knows why it now lies in ruins. The demise of the once-thriving Medieval metropolis is sometimes boiled down to drought and a drying climate, but archaeologists have now found evidence of careful water conservation amid the wreckage.

The link between ancient volcanic eruptions and the most severe extinction event the world has ever seen just got even stronger. A new analysis of mercury isotopes has provided evidence that a quarter of a billion years ago, far-flung places in Earth's Southern Hemisphere were blanketed with debris from volcanic eruptions in Siberia.

Weighing in at just 1.2 milligrams, a new robot called FAIRY – that's short for Flying Aero-robots based on Light Responsive Materials Assembly – is the first flying bot we've seen based on soft materials that respond to light. The robot was inspired by dandelion seeds, and ultimately...

For the first time, astronomers have positively identified a binary system that is destined to one day end up as a kilonova – the explosive result of a neutron star collision. And, ironically, the key ingredient to this eventual fate is a pair of failed, fizzled supernovae. This phenomenon...

The battle for the most known moons in the Solar System is raging on. After losing its lead to Saturn in 2019, Jupiter has once again surged ahead. Astronomers have counted 12 previously unknown moons in orbit around our Solar System's biggest planet, bringing the known total to 92, and leaving Saturn, with its measly count of 83, in the dust. The orbits of the moons, which are unnamed, have been published in the circulars of the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, which keeps records of all the small bodies discovered in the Solar System. The observations were led by astronomer...

Scientists have a problem when it comes to modeling space events inside laboratories: Earth's gravity tends to get in the way, making it difficult to replicate environments away from our planet. A recently proposed solution takes the form of a tiny glass ball a mere 3 centimeters (just over an...

We've just found an exoplanet almost exactly the same size as Earth orbiting a tiny star not very far away at all. It's called K2-415b, and its similarities (and differences) to our own home world might shed some light on how Earth-like planets form and evolve in different ways, in systems very different from our own.

Through a complex chemical process, scientists have been able to develop versatile, synthetic 'cyborg' cells in the lab. They share many characteristics of living cells while lacking the ability to divide and grow. That non-replication part is important. For artificial cells to be useful, they need to be carefully controlled,...

A gargantuan effort by a huge international team of scientists has just given us the most precise map of the all matter in the Universe obtained to date. By combining data from two major surveys, the international collaboration has revealed where the Universe does and doesn't keep all its junk – not just the normal matter that makes up the planets, stars, dust, black holes, galaxies, but the dark matter, too: the mysterious invisible mass generating more gravity than the normal matter can account for. The resulting map, showing where the matter has congregated over the 13.8-billion-year lifespan of the...

You can now listen to the sounds of the space around one of the Milky Way's most spectacular stars. RS Puppis, a Cepheid variable star around 6,500 light-years away, has gotten the data sonification treatment by the sci-art outreach project SYSTEM Sounds. They took a Hubble image of the star and transcribed the light into sound, assigning pitch to the direction from the center of the image and volume to the brightness of the light.

Bar charts and line graphs are both designed to help us visualize data. They are tools to convert numerical information into pictorial narratives that can be more easily comprehended. They don't change the data; they simply represent it. They do represent it in different ways, however, and even those slight...

Editor's note (5 February 2023): The veracity of the study discussed below came into question after its original publication, with a subsequent analysis suggesting the study had likely misinterpreted aspects of the historical evidence available, including oral narratives, and asserting that "Antarctic voyaging by pre-European Polynesians seems most unlikely". Some further discussion of the issue is reported here. ScienceAlert regrets re-publishing the article without drawing attention to this new information and the broader context of debate in this area of research. The original text of our story from June 2021 is presented below: When we think of Antarctic exploration, the narrative...

One day, ants might help save lives by acting as inexpensive bio-detectors. Their powerful sense of smell allows them to distinguish subtle molecular differences in biological samples that we would otherwise require expensive equipment to detect. A new proof-of-concept study just demonstrated this skill could be harnessed to detect cancers in urine samples, at least from lab mice. "Ants show the potential to become a fast, efficient, inexpensive and non-invasive tool for detection of human tumors," Sorbonne University ethologist Baptiste Piqueret and colleagues write in their paper. Cancer remains the leading cause of death worldwide, with more than 19 million cases in...

A new video shared on YouTube is one of the most amazing things we've ever seen in planetary science. The video shows four dots of light moving in partial concentric circles around a black disk at their center. What you're actually looking at is a planetary system. The four dots...