With the discovery of more than 5,600 planets orbiting other stars and images from robots we have sent to all the planets in our solar system, it is becoming abundantly clear that Earth is unique among worlds. Almost all of the exoplanets scientists have discovered since the 1990s fall into four main types: gas giants like Jupiter … Read more
NEW DELHI: Scientists have made a surprising discovery challenging the belief that brains deteriorate rapidly after death. The research led by Oxford University’s Alexandra Morton-Hayward defies the common notion of rapid brain decomposition. It was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.Over 4,400 well-preserved human brains, some dating back 12,000 years, from … Read more
Ever-closer ties have allowed private-sector aid of R170 million to flow between business and government, and not the other way round. In a difficult week that started with Stats SA releasing poor GDP data for the fourth quarter of 2023, it became clear that South Africa is effectively in a ‘per-capita recession.’ That’s according Chief Economist … Read more
Quirks and Quarks17:24How documenting the disappearance of the great auk led to the discovery of extinction When species cease to exist, we often say they went “the way of the dodo.” But it might be more fitting to say they went “the way of the great auk” because it was the Icelandic bird’s disappearance that led to the discovery that … Read more
Federal authorities have closed Canada’s only known live coral reef in the Pacific Ocean to all commercial and recreational bottom-contact fishing. Fisheries and Oceans Canada says the indefinite closure came into effect on Feb. 14 for the Lophelia Reef, located in the Finlayson Channel of British Columbia’s Central Coast, about 500 kilometres northwest of Vancouver and 200 kilometres directly east of … Read more
Toronto actor Kenneth Mitchell who found consistent work in television and film, even after a 2018 diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), has died. He was 49. Mitchell’s family said in a post on his Instagram account that the actor from Star Trek: Discovery and Jericho died on Saturday. “For five and a half years, … Read more
Some creatures are so quiet, they appear to make no sound at all. When a male treehopper calls out for a mate, he shakes his abdomen 100 times a second to produce a low sound that vibrates through the stem of the plant he is standing on. While that sound is audible to other treehoppers … Read more
There are few figures in American history as mythologized as J. Robert Oppenheimer — in no small part due to the man himself. So building a cohesive story about him — the physicist who helped define an entire scientific field so new and arcane it was called “boys’ physics”; the precocious child-genius who delivered a … Read more
People could be making tracks to see an impressive new exhibit of 320-million-year-old footprints at the Cape Breton Fossil Centre in Sydney Mines, N.S. A group of geologists from Cape Breton University recently found fossilized claw imprints that are remarkable for their size and age. “The stuff we get on Cape Breton and in Nova Scotia … Read more
The 2013 discovery of the largest collection of hominid fossils ever found is rewriting the origin of complex behaviours we thought were uniquely human, says a renowned paleoanthropologist. The fossilized bones belonged to an entirely new species of ancient human relatives called, Homo naledi, which lived in South Africa several hundred thousand years ago when the first Homo … Read more
