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Engravings rewrite human history

A shell found on Java in the late 1800s was recently found to bear markings that seem to have been carved intentionally half a million years ago. The photograph is about 15 millimetres wide. Credit: Wim Lustenhouwer/VU University Amsterdam.
Scientists have found engravings on a 400,000 year-old fossilised shell from Java. It is the oldest known example of ancient humans deliberately creating pattern. Before [...]

Superstar Eta Carinae

Eta Carinae's great eruption in the 1840s created the billowing Homunculus Nebula, imaged here by Hubble. Now about a light-year long, the expanding cloud contains enough material to make at least 10 copies of our sun. Astronomers cannot yet explain what caused this eruption. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team
Eta Carinae is the most luminous and massive stellar system within 10,000 light-years of Earth (the distance light travels in 10,000 years). It is known for its surprising [...]

A frog that gives birth

The L. larvaepartus frog (male, left, and female) from the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia. It is the only frog known that gives birth to tadpoles rather than laying spawn. Credit: Jim McGuire photos.
Most frogs lay eggs (frogspawn) in water that grow into tadpoles, froglets and then grown-up frogs. Now scientists have found a frog in the rainforests of Sulawesi Island, [...]

Morning Glory

A photograph of the Morning Glory Pool from 23 August, 2012, showing bright colours of red, orange, yellow and green. Credit: Joseph Shaw, Montana State University.
Researchers at Montana State University (USA) and Brandenburg University of Applied Sciences (Germany) have come up with an explanation for the beautiful colours of hot [...]

Superstrong and lightweight

The high-entropy alloy. Credit: North Carolina State University
Researchers from North Carolina State University in the USA and Qatar University have developed a super-strong mixture of metals that is stronger for its weight than any [...]

Sunspots

A mid-level solar flare erupted on the sun on 18 December 2014. It can be seen in this image from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) as the bright spot near the center of the sun. SDO observes light in extreme ultraviolet wavelengths that can highlight the intense heat present in a solar flare. Credit: NASA/SDO
Bursts of magnetic activity on the sun make sunspots, which can be seen with special [...]

Supershiny eggs

Photograph of shiny, iridescent eggs coloured white, yellow and brown.
Relatives of ostriches and emus, Tinamou birds, lay supershiny eggs, but until now no-one knew how the eggs got so beautiful. Researchers at the University of Akron in the [...]

Electric eels hunt by remote control

An electric eel (Electrophorus electricus). Credit: Doug Letterman (flickr). Image may have been cropped.
Researchers have discovered that electric eels use electricity as a sort of remote control on the fishes’ muscles. Kenneth Catania of Vanderbilt University in the USA [...]

Turning sawdust into petrol

A small pile of sawdust over heartwood rings. Cropped the original by Horia Varlan on flickr.
You probably know that there’s a problem with petrol. It’s made from crude oil dug out of the ground, and at some point in the future, supplies will run out. So [...]
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