Tag Archives: ScienceAlert

The next frontier for precious minerals could be much closer to home than the asteroid belt out past the orbit of Mars. A new paper proposes that the minerals borne by these asteroids may have come to us, and are now scattered across thousands of impact craters on the Moon. There, up to 6,500 impact craters may contain precious platinum-group …

An ancient skull, warped and damaged by the ravages of time and degradation, may have just altered our understanding of the history of modern humans. Using careful 3D scanning and digital reconstruction techniques, a team of researchers from China and the UK has rebuilt the damaged artifact, discovering exactly where it fits on the hominid family tree. It’s not the …

With help from amateur astronomers, scientists tracked how an asteroid travelled from space, broke up in Earth’s atmosphere and sent fiery fragments shooting to the ground, gathering new information about how these space rocks disintegrate. Asteroid 2023 CX1 briefly lit up the sky as it disintegrated over northwestern France at around 4:00 pm (1400 GMT) on February 13, 2023. Seven …

Until Homo floresiensis was discovered, scientists assumed that the evolution of the human lineage was defined by bigger and bigger brains. Via a process called encephalization, human brains evolved to be relatively more massive than would be expected based on corresponding body size. This proportionally bigger brain is what anthropologists argued enabled us and our relatives to perform more complex …

It’s well known that learning to play an instrument can offer benefits beyond just musical ability. Indeed, research shows it’s a great activity for the brain – it can enhance our fine motor skills, language acquisition, speech, and memory – and it can even help to keep our brains younger. After years of working with musicians and witnessing how they …

Asteroid 2024 YR4 caused quite a stir last year when it was discovered and originally calculated to have a 3 percent chance of hitting Earth. Since then, models have been refined, and while it no longer has a chance of hitting Earth, it does have a 4 percent chance of hitting the Moon in December 2032. As that time gets …

Find yourself prone to anxiety? The roots of the condition could stretch back to before you were even born, according to a new study in mice. Researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine in the US have found that infection or stress in a mother during pregnancy could increase the risk of the offspring developing anxiety as an adult. Studies have previously …

Microplastics are now so ubiquitous we’re drinking, eating, and inhaling them. As a result, they’re showing up in our poop, placentas, reproductive organs, and brains. Now these fossil-fuel-derived particles, less than 5 mm in size, have been found deep within our bones. A new review of 62 studies suggests microplastics and smaller nanoplastics are impacting our skeletal health in multiple …

Mysteries abound in the Solar System. Though it can sometimes seem like we’ve learned a lot, you can pick any object in the Solar System and quickly come up with unanswered questions. That’s certainly true of tiny Mercury. Mercury’s mystery lies in its core. Ground based radio observations during the 1960s and 1970s showed that it had a massive core. …

Daylight saving time, that yearly yawn-a-thon that kicks in each spring, may not just affect our bodies temporarily. New evidence suggests that winding our clocks forward in spring and backward in autumn is taking a toll on some aspects of our long-term health. It’s not just the clock on the wall that has to change twice a year with this …