Tag Archives: ScienceAlert

Our first meeting was a bit awkward. One of us is an archaeologist who studies how past peoples interacted with their environments. Two of us are geophysicists who investigate interactions between solar activity and Earth’s magnetic field. When we first got together, we wondered whether our unconventional project, linking space weather and human behavior, could actually bridge such a vast …

A person in Arizona has died from the plague, local health officials reported on Friday. This marks the first such death in this region in 18 years. But it’s a stark reminder that this historic disease, though rare nowadays, is not just a disease of the past. So what actually is “plague”? And is it any cause for concern in …

Blindness, pneumonia, severe diarrhoea and even death – measles virus infections, especially in children, can have devastating consequences. Fortunately, we have a safe and effective defence. Measles vaccines are estimated to have averted more than 60 million deaths between 2000 and 2023. Yet despite this success, measles cases are rising sharply in the UK and around the world. This global …

If you want to get by in this world, you could do a lot worse than developing a predilection for ants. In fact, ant-eating may be a dramatically overlooked recipe for success. According to new research, relying on ants as a sole food source has evolved at least 12 times in mammals since the reign of the dinosaurs ended some …

One challenge of dieting is maintaining healthy eating habits, avoiding the so-called ‘yo-yo dieting’ effect. Now a new study suggests that effect might be closely linked to the bacteria living in our guts. A team led by researchers from the University of Rennes and Paris-Saclay University in France ran a series of experiments on mice, measuring their reactions to rotating …

Despite the powerful telescopes that modern astronomers have to work with, the distant reaches of the Solar System are still mysterious. Not much sunlight pierces these regions, and there are strong hints that undiscovered objects lurk there. The objects that astronomers have discovered in these dim reaches are primordial, and their orbits suggest the presence of more undiscovered objects. Piecing …

In April, when Yellowstone National Park geologists made their first visit this year to the Norris Geyser Basin, they encountered a new feature they hadn’t seen before. They were checking the area’s temperature logging stations, a routine maintenance job – but since their last visit, something was different. Where previously there had been a rather featureless patch of ground at …

We’ve only known about its existence for a few short weeks, and already astronomers have been able to learn a lot about the mysterious interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. The object was detected on 1 July 2025, and it made a big splash. Scientists rapidly discovered that it came from outside the Solar System – just the third known object to have …

The largest individual Martian rock ever found on Earth has sold at a Sotheby’s auction for almost US$5.3 million, to an anonymous bidder. This massive chunk of Mars is a meteorite named NWA-16788, and at 24.67 kilograms (54.39 pounds), it towers over the previous record-holder, Taoudenni 002, a meteorite weighing 14.51 kg found in Mali back in 2021. The Sotheby’s …

A remarkable 2.35 billion year old meteorite found in Africa in 2023 has opened a new window into the Moon‘s volcanic history, filling a gap in our understanding of how Earth’s closest neighbour evolved over billions of years. The meteorite, officially named Northwest Africa 16286 (gets award for catchiest meteorite name!) represents the youngest basaltic lunar meteorite ever discovered on …