The ship itself is gone. Teredo worms saw to that — centuries of boring through waterlogged timber until every plank, every rib, every trace of the hull dissolved into the seabed at the eastern mouth of the Singapore Strait. What the worms couldn’t eat was the cargo. And what a cargo it turned out to ... Read more The post Singapore’s First Shipwreck Carried a Record Haul of China’s Rarest Porcelain appeared first on SciChi.

Some of the wolf teeth that Amanda Burtt examined have been sitting in museum drawers since the 1840s. They were pulled from British caves and gravel pits by Victorian collectors who had no concept of climate change, no electron microscopes, and certainly no idea that the scratches on a molar could tell you what an ... Read more The post Wolf Teeth Reveal a Hidden Cost of Warmer Winters appeared first on Wild Science.

Late afternoon in a Costa Rican cattle pasture, and Christine Dahlin is sitting beneath a large tree with an old-school video camera and a directional microphone, waiting. The yellow-naped amazons that nest here won’t show up for a while yet — they spend their days foraging in small flocks elsewhere, only returning to their breeding ... Read more The post Wild Parrots Sing Duets With Grammar Rules That Rival Human Language appeared first on Wild Science.

IT IS the ultimate biological "ghost in the machine". Inside your neurons and cardiac tissue, trillions of tiny valves are working frantically to manage the electrical surges that allow you to think, move and keep your heart beating. Most of these valves, known as ion channels, act like macroscopic gates: they physically slam shut to stop the flow of charged particles.

The sample was barely a teaspoon's worth of dark, precious dust. Scooped from the surface of asteroid Bennu by NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft and delivered to Earth in September 2023, it had travelled roughly 4.6 billion years through space to reach a lab bench at Penn State. And now, using custom-built instruments sensitive enough to weigh isotopic differences at the picomole scale, a team of researchers has coaxed a secret from that pinch of grit that could rewrite how we think about the origins of life's most basic ingredients.

The planets orbiting the star HR 8799 are, by any reasonable measure, enormous. Each one clocks in at five to ten times the mass of Jupiter, and they swing around their star at vast distances, the closest still 15 times farther out than Earth is from the sun. For years, astronomers looked at this system, roughly 133 light years away in the constellation Pegasus, and couldn't quite work out how it got there.

Imagine your heart hammering, your breath coming in sharp gasps, sweat prickling across your skin. For most of us, that's just what happens after a hard run. But for the roughly 2 to 3 per cent of people living with panic disorder, those same sensations can strike without warning, triggering waves of terror that seem to come from nowhere. Now a team in São Paulo, Brazil, has turned that overlap into a treatment.

THE NUCLEUS of galaxy IRAS 07251-0248 sits buried beneath such vast amounts of gas and dust that conventional telescopes can barely glimpse what's happening inside. Hardly the sort of place you'd expect to find abundant organic molecules. The material absorbs most of the radiation blasting from the central supermassive black hole, creating a cosmic fortress that's kept its secrets remarkably well.

THE MICE WITH lumbar spine instability shouldn't have been moving much. Their vertebrae, surgically destabilized to mimic the kind of degeneration that afflicts millions of people with chronic back pain, had developed the telltale signs of the condition: porous, sclerotic endplates and an invasion of pain-sensing nerves into tissue where they don't belong. But after two months of daily hormone injections, they were running on their activity wheels, tolerating pressure on their spines, and withdrawing more slowly from heat.

The nurse sharks swimming through Miami’s glowing coastal waters at night aren’t getting much sleep. Their blood tells the story: melatonin levels suppressed, circadian rhythms disrupted, all because the city never really goes dark. For the first time, researchers have measured the hormone in wild sharks and found that artificial light is throwing their biological ... Read more The post City Lights Are Messing With Sharks’ Internal Clocks appeared first on Wild Science.

The bones were so small that at first glance they looked like they might belong to juveniles. But Fidel Torcida Fernández-Baldor of the Dinosaur Museum of Salas de los Infantes reckoned otherwise. Scattered across the Burgos Province site in northern Spain, the delicate fossils represented at least five individuals—all adults, all impossibly tiny for dinosaurs. ... Read more The post Tiny Dinosaur Rewrites 70 Million Years of Evolution appeared first on Wild Science.

The Battambang bat caves draw tourists from around the world. Each evening, thousands of bats pour from the limestone cliffs in swirling clouds, a spectacle that fills the Cambodian sky. What visitors don’t see is the invisible cargo these flying mammals carry, a sprawling viral universe that researchers are only beginning to map. Between 2020 ... Read more The post Bat Caves In Cambodia Hide Clues To A Pig Pandemic’s Mysterious Origins appeared first on SciChi.

In the first weeks of January 2025, Michael Anestis and his team at Rutgers University's New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center were watching something unexpected unfold. The same adults they'd surveyed just before the November election were reporting changed intentions around firearms. Not the usual suspects, either - the demographics were shifting in ways that challenge decades of assumptions about who owns guns and why.

Jean Giacomotto had 18 days to find an answer. Two newborns, one in Australia, one in Germany, carried genetic mutations nobody had seen before. Each baby also carried a known deadly mutation for spinal muscular atrophy, making them prime candidates for treatment. But the novel mutations were wildcards, and without knowing whether they were harmful, ... Read more The post The Fish That Saved Two Million Dollars appeared first on Wild Science.

In a laboratory at Nanjing Agricultural University, a common soil fungus is doing something chemical engineers have struggled with for decades. Aspergillus niger, the same organism that helps ferment soy sauce and produces citric acid for fizzy drinks, is quietly dissolving phosphorus from one of the world’s most problematic industrial wastes. The waste is phosphogypsum, ... Read more The post The Fungus Munching Through Mountains Of Toxic Waste appeared first on SciChi.

Gene therapy just leapt past a barrier that’s held it back for years. Researchers in China have worked out how to pack oversized genes into the viral delivery vehicles that doctors use to treat genetic diseases, a trick that could unlock treatments for hundreds of conditions previously considered untreatable. The breakthrough centres on adeno-associated viruses, ... Read more The post New Technique Unlocks Gene Therapy for Hundreds of Conditions appeared first on SciChi.

Off Canada’s coast, in the cold waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, something extraordinary is quietly happening. Three species of baleen whales—creatures so massive they seem to belong to another era—are changing what they eat. They’re doing it together, shifting their feeding patterns as the ocean warms. But this isn’t the violent competition you ... Read more The post Whales Share Resources to Survive Climate Change appeared first on Wild Science.

Imagine you’re a PhD student named Leo. You have two choices. You could spend the next five years in a dusty basement lab, trying to figure out a “weird” question about how the very first molecules of life sparked into existence. There’s no data to help you, the experiments often fail, and your peers might ... Read more The post AI Is Making Scientists Stars While Dimming the Light of Discovery appeared first on NeuroEdge.

The ice in Bristol Bay closes down hard by November, locking away the whales for months in the icebound waters beneath it. When researchers finally arrive in spring with their small boats and biopsies, they’re after something most people never think about: who’s sleeping with whom, and what it means for survival in one of ... Read more The post Arctic Whales Use Genetic Insurance To Prevent Extinction appeared first on Wild Science.

Picture a task so simple it takes four minutes. Generate ten words. That’s all. Make them as different from each other as possible, in every way that matters (meaning, usage, the way they sound in the mouth). This isn’t a test you’d find in an IQ exam or written into the competitive frameworks that sort ... Read more The post The Creativity Threshold: When AI Meets the Average Mind appeared first on NeuroEdge.

The comedian takes a breath, counts to three in her head, and delivers the punchline about hippies managing finances. Laughter ripples through the Edinburgh venue, timing out at roughly 2.4 seconds before she continues. Tomorrow night, different audience, she'll pause for 2.6 seconds in the same spot. Next week it might be 2.2 seconds, but the pause will be there, predictable as clockwork, even if the laughter isn't.

Eight million tonnes of cigarette butts are tossed onto streets and into bins worldwide each year. Most decompose glacially slowly, leaching toxins as they go. But what if this ubiquitous waste could power your phone? Researchers in China have transformed discarded cigarette filters into carbon supercapacitors with performance that rivals commercial activated carbon. The trick ... Read more The post The Cigarette Butt Supercapacitor appeared first on SciChi.

Pancreatic cancer kills quietly. By the time symptoms appear, the disease has usually spread beyond surgical reach. Researchers at Tokyo University of Science have now identified a gene whose early disappearance helps explain why some tumors turn lethal so fast. The gene, CTDNEP1, shows significantly reduced activity even in stage I tumors. That's unusual. Most pancreatic cancer biomarkers emerge late, when treatment options narrow.

Stroke patients grinding through repetitive arm exercises know the look: a therapist checking the clock, mentally calculating how many more patients need attention before shift end. That glance, however brief, changes the room. Healthcare systems worldwide are hemorrhaging staff faster than training programs can replace them, and researchers are asking whether machines might fill not ... Read more The post Artificial Empathy and the Future of Lonely Recovery appeared first on SciChi.

Families watching Alzheimer’s take hold have heard promises before. But what if the answer wasn’t a drug or surgery, but a sound—a low, steady drone at the pitch of a refrigerator hum? Inside a research lab in China, nine aged rhesus monkeys sat near speakers emitting 40-hertz tones for an hour each day. After just ... Read more The post A Persistent Hum Might Help Clear Alzheimer’s Plaques—For Weeks appeared first on SciChi.