By Alison George The arc of former standing stones at Waun MawnA. StanfordThe origins of Stonehenge have long been a mystery. Now new discoveries show that the iconic monument may have started as a stone circle in Wales that was then dismantled and rebuilt 280 kilometres away at its current location on Salisbury plain. This…
By Ibrahim Sawal These mini brains contain a Neanderthal version of a certain geneUC San Diego Health SciencesMiniature brains grown in the lab are helping to reveal how modern humans survived when other hominins died out. Neanderthals and Denisovans are some of our closest relatives. They lived alongside us about 50,000 years ago when modern…
By Ibrahim Sawal A picture of the galaxy called ALESS 073.1, just 1.2 billion years after the big bangCardiff UniversityAstronomers have spotted a galaxy they know to be young but which has features typically seen only in older galaxies. This finding is challenging our current understanding of how quickly galaxies form. Galaxies are thought to…
By Karina Shah A fin whale swimming off the coast of the Azores in the Atlantic OceanWildestanimal/AlamyFin whale songs, one of the loudest animal calls in the ocean, can be used to learn about the structure of Earth’s crust. Václav Kuna at the Institute of Geophysics of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague and…
Environment 13 February 2021 By Adam Vaughan Bill GatesCourtesy of the authorHow to Avoid a Climate Disaster Bill GatesAllen Lane (buy from Amazon) “I am aware that I am an imperfect messenger on climate change,” writes Bill Gates in his book on why he thinks the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions by…
Environment 13 February 2021 By Adam Vaughan Bill Gates’s private jet at Kristiansand airport in Kjevik, NorwayScanpix Norway/PA ImagesBill Gates has admitted to flying on a private jet to the Paris climate change summit in 2015. Green campaigners say the revelation, made in his new book on reducing carbon emissions, undermines the billionaire philanthropist’s message.…
Space 12 February 2021 By Leah Crane Evidence is stacking up against the possibility of a Planet 9 beyond NeptuneAlamy Stock PhotoThe evidence for a mysterious planet at our solar system’s edge has become less convincing. The existence of this unseen world was inferred from unexpected clustering of objects that orbit the sun beyond Neptune,…
Technology 12 February 2021 By Krista Charles Space shuttle Endeavour in 2010. The orange layer is the troposphere. The whitish layer above it is the stratosphere and above that is the mesosphereNASA/Crew of Expedition 22Sunlight could be used to power microfliers travelling above the stratosphere in the mesosphere. At present, the only vehicles that can…
By Michael Le Page , Clare Wilson , Jessica Hamzelou , Sam Wong , Graham Lawton , Adam Vaughan , Conrad Quilty-Harper and Layal Liverpool A woman receives the Oxford/AstraZeneca covid19 vaccine at an NHS vaccination center in Ealing, west LondonNEIL HALL/EPA-EFE/ShutterstockLatest coronavirus news as of 4.30pm on 12 February Vaccinations of people under 70…
Space 12 February 2021 By Jonathan O’Callaghan An artist’s impression of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopterNASA/JPL-CaltechNASA is about to fly the first helicopter on Mars, and it turns out that its rotors could glow in the dark as they react with Martian dust. NASA’s Perseverance rover is set to touch down in Jezero Crater on Mars…
By Adam Vaughan A worker packages frozen steak for export at a beef processing plant in Binzhou, in eastern China’s Shandong provinceSTR/AFP via Getty ImagesDid the virus that caused a worldwide pandemic make the jump to humans via frozen food? That was one hypothesis put forward on 9 February by a joint World Health Organization…
By Gege Li North Pole sign in melting ice and meltwaterSue FloodThe terrifying, transformative effects of climate change are captured perfectly in North Pole Underwater, an image taken by photographer Sue Flood. The signpost at the centre of the photo represents the geographic North Pole in the Arctic, the northernmost point on the planet at…