Science And Sciencibility

where each text is a hypertext link

Thursday, 2 April 2026

Sunbirds suck nectar with supple tongues

›
Sunbirds (Nectariniidae) drink nectar from flowers by generating suction with their tongues — the first example of a vertebrate creating suc...
Wednesday, 1 April 2026

Quantum simulations verified by experiments for the first time

›
For the first time, physicists have matched detailed quantum-computer simulations to experimental data gathered from work with solid materia...
Friday, 27 March 2026

Genetic record for domestic dogs pushed back by 5,000 years

›
Researchers have identified the earliest known dog genomes, which push the genetic record for dogs back by more than 5,000 years. They recov...
Tuesday, 24 March 2026

‘Nuclear clocks’ tick closer to reality

›
After decades of research, physicists are confident that the first tick of a ‘nuclear clock’ is imminent. This device would keep time by mea...
Saturday, 21 March 2026

Debate explodes over age of key South American archæological site

›
An archæological site that overturned the history of humans in South America might just do it again. Radiocarbon dating pegged artefacts fro...
Friday, 20 March 2026

New psychedelic fungus rewrites origins of magic mushrooms

›
A newly described species of ‘magic mushroom’ could upend a popular theory of when psychedelic fungi popped up around the world. Researchers...
Thursday, 12 March 2026

‘Virtual cell’ captures most-basic process of life: bacterial division

›
Researchers have created a 3D simulation that models DNA replication, cell division and nearly every chemical reaction in a living bacterial...
Saturday, 7 March 2026

First ‘half Möbius’ carbon chain could unlock strange physical properties

›
Chemists have synthesised a new type of carbon-based molecule with an unprecedented twist in its structure. The team calls the looped molec...
Friday, 6 March 2026

Galileo’s handwritten notes found in ancient astronomy text

›
Around 1590, Galileo Galilei filled the margins of a copy of Ptolemy’s The Almagest with his musings — and they have just been rediscovered....
Thursday, 5 March 2026

Earth’s oldest crystals suggest an early start for plate tectonics

›
Chemical evidence from ancient crystals suggests that Earth’s tectonic plates had already started moving 3.3 billion years ago, relatively e...
Wednesday, 4 March 2026

Why ‘quantum proteins’ could be the next big thing in biology

›
Researchers have found ways to turn fluorescent-protein labels — coloured tags used to track the inner workings of a cell — into qubits, the...
Tuesday, 3 March 2026

Neanderthal dad, Sapiens mum: study reveals ancient procreation pattern

›
Genetic evidence from three Neanderthal ( Homo neanderthalensis ) specimens suggests female Homo sapiens and male Neanderthals mated more o...
Friday, 27 February 2026

40,000-year-old German artefacts may display written language precursor

›
A series of notches carved on a piece of mammoth ivory roughly 40,000 years ago could be an early ancestor of cuneiform, one of the oldest-k...
Thursday, 26 February 2026

Ancient rocks point to an early start for the Great Unconformity

›
Fresh evidence from rocks in China is contributing to debate about what caused the ‘Great Unconformity’ — a one-billion-year gap in the geol...
Saturday, 21 February 2026

Glass tile can store data for millennia

›
Researchers at Microsoft have created a data-storage system that can remain readable for at least 10,000 years — and probably much longer. T...
Friday, 20 February 2026

Giant virus hijacks cells’ protein-making machinery to multiply wildly

›
Scientists have identified a giant virus that can hijack a host cell’s protein-making machinery to churn out copies of itself — the first ex...
Wednesday, 18 February 2026

Canadian fossil reveals one of the first plant-eating animals

›
A fossilised skull dated to more than 300 million years ago has been identified as belonging to Tyrannoroter heberti , a newly described ‘mi...
Sunday, 15 February 2026

Hunter-gatherers took refuge in European 'water world' for millennia

›
Ancient genomic data has revealed that inhabitants of the Rhine-Meuse river delta — wetland and coastal areas of modern-day Netherlands, Bel...
Saturday, 14 February 2026

Rules of mysterious ancient Roman board game decoded by AI

›
Researchers say they have figured out the rules of an ancient Roman board game. The team simulated thousands of turns based on more than 100...
Friday, 13 February 2026

Sibling Rivalry in Baboons

›
Young chacma baboons ( Papio ursinus ) vie for their mother’s attention more often when she’s grooming one of their siblings than when she’s...
Thursday, 12 February 2026

Does the galaxy have dark matter at heart?

›
The black hole at the centre of our galaxy might actually be a huge blob of dark matter, suggest astrophysicists. A super-dense core of suba...
Tuesday, 3 February 2026

Does AI already have human-level intelligence? The evidence is clear

›
When will artificial intelligence systems achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), when defined as the ability to convincingly imitate...
Wednesday, 28 January 2026

430,000-Year-Old Wooden Tools Are the Oldest Ever Found

›
Wooden objects carrying the marks of carving and use could be the oldest wooden tools ever found. Researchers dated the artefacts, found in ...
Tuesday, 27 January 2026

First animals known to fake the smell of flowers

›
Larvae of the European blister beetle ( Meloe proscarabaeus ) mimic the scent of flowers to find a ride to their next meal. The larvae produ...
Saturday, 24 January 2026

Schrödinger’s cat just got bigger: quantum physicists create largest ever ‘superposition’

›
In the iconic quantum double-slit experiment, a photon acts like a wave and interferes with itself — illustrating the mind-boggling concept ...
Friday, 23 January 2026

Oldest cave painting of red claw hand could rewrite human creativity timeline

›
The outline of a hand discovered in an Indonesian cave has been dated to at least 67,800 years ago — the oldest known example of cave art in...
Tuesday, 20 January 2026

These dogs can learn new words just by eavesdropping

›
Some gifted dogs can learn words for hundreds of objects and pick up new ones just by listening in to the conversations of human family memb...
Saturday, 17 January 2026

Flowers hint at maths before numerals

›
Pottery made by people of the Halafian culture, who inhabited northern Mesopotamia between around 6200 and 5500 BC, is painted with flowers ...
Friday, 16 January 2026

Wolf pup’s stomach yields DNA from one of world’s last surviving woolly rhinos

›
A genomic analysis of around 14,400-year-old woolly rhino ( Coelodonta antiquitatis ) tissue — recovered from the stomach of an ice age wolf...
Wednesday, 14 January 2026

How did birds evolve?

›
For more than a century, Archaeopteryx was the earliest known bird genus, and the only one known from the Jurassic period, when birds first...
Friday, 9 January 2026

Poison arrows used 60,000 years ago

›
Traces of toxic compounds have been found on 60,000-year-old arrowheads, providing the oldest chemical evidence that Palaeolithic hunter-gat...
Saturday, 20 December 2025

Strange lemon-shaped exoplanet defies the rules of planet formation

›
The exoplanet PSR J2322-2650b is a place of unimaginable weirdness. It takes just 7.8 hours to orbit its star, which is an ultra-dense pulsa...
Sunday, 14 December 2025

Neanderthals mastered fire — 400,000 years ago

›
Baked soil, ancient tools and materials that could be used to start fires show that Neanderthals were making fire in the UK 400,000 years ag...
Saturday, 13 December 2025

Orcas and dolphins join forces to hunt

›
Orcas and Pacific white-sided dolphins have been spotted working together to hunt. The dolphins seem to act as ‘scouts’ to help find Chinook...
Wednesday, 10 December 2025

Ancient Egyptian pleasure boat found by archaeologists off Alexandria coast

›
Archaeologists have discovered an ancient Egyptian pleasure boat buried off the coast of Alexandria. Researchers estimate that the 35-metre-...
Thursday, 4 December 2025

Sick baby ants sacrifice themselves to save their colony

›
A worker ant pupa ( Lasius neglectus ) that’s infected with a fungus will send out a chemical alarm that it must be destroyed to contain the...
Wednesday, 3 December 2025

‘Fire amoeba’ survives in hotter conditions than any other complex cell

›
A newly discovered amoeba ( Incendiamoeba cascadensis ) can thrive at temperatures up to 64 °C — hotter than any other known complex cell. R...
Sunday, 30 November 2025

We are all mosaics: vast genetic diversity found between cells in a single person

›
Researchers have sequenced the whole genomes of more than 100 individual cells from one 74-year-old man to reveal a full picture of the gene...
Saturday, 29 November 2025

This Fossil Is Rewriting the Story of How Plants Spread across the Planet

›
The first plants to get a foothold on land are a mystery, because there are few fossils — except for Spongiophyton . But the enigmatic lifef...
Saturday, 22 November 2025

Has birds’ mysterious ‘compass’ organ been found at last?

›
Pigeons ( Columba livia ) seem to be able to sense magnetic fields by detecting tiny electrical currents in their inner ears. Researchers pe...
Tuesday, 18 November 2025

Mammoth mummies up to 50,000 years old yield oldest RNA yet found

›
Researchers have found the oldest RNA molecules to date in mummified woolly mammoth tissue. RNA is a fragile molecule, which makes intact an...
Wednesday, 12 November 2025

Computers that run on human brain cells

›
At a company on the shores of Lake Geneva, clumps of living brain cells are waiting for your call. These blobs, about the size of a grain of...
Tuesday, 11 November 2025

Surprise ‘tail’ found on an iconic galaxy may rewrite its history

›
In the first test image from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, astronomers have spotted a ‘tail’ on the galaxy Messier 61 — a thread o...
Friday, 7 November 2025

‘Mind-captioning’ AI decodes brain activity to turn thoughts into text

›
A technique called ‘mind captioning’ generates descriptive sentences of what a person is seeing or picturing in their mind using scans of th...
Thursday, 6 November 2025

Biggest black-hole outburst ever seen records death throes of a star

›
Scientists have described a ‘superflare’ from a distant black hole — the most luminous burst of light ever detected from such an object. At ...
Wednesday, 5 November 2025

First Shape Found That Can’t Pass Through Itself

›
A shape called a ‘noperthedron’ — a faceted ball made of 150 triangles and two regular 15-sided polygons — is the first to break a long-stan...
Sunday, 2 November 2025

‘Teenage T. rex’ fossil is actually a different species

›
A fossil once assumed to be of a young Tyrannosaurus rex is in fact that of a fully grown adult of a different species altogether. The speci...
Saturday, 1 November 2025

Too much social media gives AI chatbots ‘brain rot’

›
Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots trained on ‘brain rot’ content — vapid social media posts that are the equivalent of mental junk food ...
›
Home
View web version
Powered by Blogger.