Tag Archives: ScienceAlert

Dinosaur life wasn’t all peaches and cream before the Chicxulub asteroid struck Earth. Some were plagued by much smaller dangers long before. A new study has found evidence that a potentially deadly bone disease endangered the lives of numerous long-necked dinosaurs in what is now Brazil, roughly 80 million years ago. These are some of South America’s largest dinosaurs, and …

The next time you find yourself in a car, driving along a winding road, why not turn on an uplifting tune? It might help you recover from motion sickness. A team of researchers led by neuroscientist Yilun Li at China’s Henan Institute of Science and Technology has found music may be a surprisingly effective intervention for reducing nausea and dizziness …

The pulse of an atom’s magnetic heart as it ticks back and forth between quantum states has been timed in a laboratory. Physicists used a scanning tunneling microscope to observe electrons as they moved in sync with the nucleus of an atom of titanium-49, allowing them to estimate the duration of the core’s magnetic beat in isolation. “These findings,” they …

Stargazers will have a chance to see a ” Blood Moon” on Sunday night during a total lunar eclipse visible across Asia and swathes of Europe and Africa. When the Sun, Earth, and Moon line up, the shadow cast by the planet on its satellite makes it appear an eerie, deep red colour that has astounded humans for millennia. People …

Some ant queens can produce offspring of more than one species – even when the other species is not known to exist in the nearby wild. No other animal on Earth is known to do this, and it’s hard for even scientists to believe. “It’s an absolutely fantastic, bizarre story of a system that allows things to happen that seem …

The brain has its own waste disposal system – known as the glymphatic system – that’s thought to be more active when we sleep. But disrupted sleep might hinder this waste disposal system and slow the clearance of waste products or toxins from the brain. And researchers are proposing a build-up of these toxins due to lost sleep could increase …

Plastics are now everywhere, with tiny fragments found in several major organs of the human body, including the placenta. Given how easily the microscopic particles infiltrate our tissues, it’s vital that we learn exactly what kinds of risks they could pose to our health. Researchers have been busy studying the effects of microplastics in mini-replicas of organs, and in mice, …

The pain of gout has been with us for millennia at least, but scientists have gone back much further in time – more than 20 million years – to bring back a gene that could help treat the condition and others like it. When there’s too much uric acid in the blood, it forms crystals in the joints and the …

If you’ve ever tried to lose weight, you’ve probably been told that cooking your own meals is the way to go. This has been backed up by a recent study, which found that people who ate home-cooked, minimally processed foods lost twice the weight compared to those who ate mainly ultra-processed, ready-made foods. The recent study, which was published in …

The asteroid Ryugu is an echo from the deep, distant past. Two tiny grains of the rock, delivered to Earth in 2020 by the famous Hayabusa2 mission, contain minerals older than any found on our planet. One grain comes from the asteroid’s surface, the other from within. Both are incredible archives of our early Solar System and the chemical reactions …