Tag Archives: ScienceAlert

The large-scale deposits of salt around the Dead Sea, known as salt giants, are built up as the lake’s highly saline water evaporates, and a new study of their formation has revealed some of the secrets of these mounds of halite. That’s exciting for geologists, because salt giants can be found in several other places, including under the Mediterranean Sea. …

A study published in 2022 found a tenuous but plausible link between picking your nose and an increased risk of developing dementia. In cases where picking at your nose causes internal tissue damage, critical species of bacteria have a clearer path to the brain, which responds to their presence in ways that resemble signs of Alzheimer’s disease. There are numerous …

A single bout of physical activity could fill the bloodstream with cancer-busting allies. In an experiment involving 32 breast cancer survivors, a 45-minute session of either resistance training or high-intensity interval training resulted in a surge of messenger proteins in the blood. When these players, called myokines, were introduced to breast cancer samples in the lab, they suppressed the growth …

Tiny shards of plastic called microplastics have been detected accumulating in human brains, but there is not yet enough evidence to say whether this is doing us harm, experts have said. These mostly invisible pieces of plastic have been found everywhere from the top of mountains to the bottom of oceans, in the air we breathe and the food we …

Although humanity is getting better at sending robotic probes out into the Solar System to explore the places no human can tread, we’re still very much on a learning curve. The first extraterrestrial robotic rover was launched from Earth in 1970. It’s only now, more than half a century later, that scientists have figured out why these marvels of ingenuity …

Just as ocean waves shape our shores, ripples in space-time may have once set the Universe on an evolutionary path that led to the cosmos as we see it today. A new theory suggests gravitational waves – rather than hypothetical particles called inflatons – drove the Universe’s early expansion, and the redistribution of matter therein. “For decades, we have tried …

Four new species of tarantula have been discovered – and if they knew the name they were going to get, they might have presented themselves sooner. The males are so well-endowed that scientists essentially named them the ‘genital king.’ Spiders don’t really have penises, in the traditional sense. Instead, they use arm-like structures called palps to grab sperm from ducts …

So many people in western countries are turning to weight loss drugs such as Wegovy/Ozempic and Mounjaro that concerns have started to emerge about maintaining ready supplies. But with popularity comes scrutiny, and rising demand isn’t the only potential problem with weight loss jabs. Gastrointestinal side-effects such as nausea, vomiting and constipation are common across these drugs, which are known …

Earth’s skies are about to be graced by a full Moon, plump and shining in the sky, swimming across a lake of stars like a giant sturgeon. Okay, maybe not, but the full Moon that will rise on Friday 8 and Saturday 9 August is called the full Sturgeon Moon, the old US Farmer’s Almanac name for the Moon for …

Chronic fatigue syndrome or myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS) is a debilitating and long-neglected disease that experts typically dismissed as psychosomatic for decades. To this day, some physicians still believe the illness is all in a patient’s head, but the largest genetic analysis of its kind suggests there are real biological origins. A UK research project, called DecodeME, has investigated the genome-wide …