All cats are psychopaths
Most people know that cats can be unpredictable. Now, scientists have developed a test which proves that cats have psychopathic characteristics. Cats have been loved, valued and even worshipped by people for thousands…
Aussie lungfish has largest animal genome known to science
Scientists are teasing out the secrets that place the Australian lungfish near a critical moment of evolution. A team of researchers at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna has sequenced…
Aussie Anne Abbott wins John Maddox Prize for ‘Standing up for Science’
While the main John Maddox Prize for 2020 goes to Anthony Fauci and Salim Abdool Karim for their communication of evidence during the Covid-19 pandemic, the judges have again this year chosen to…
Lorikeets rule as 4.6 million birds are counted in 7 days
The 2020 Aussie Backyard Bird Count achieves a record response for citizen-based science. Unprecedented numbers of people across Australia took part in BirdLife Australia’s popular 2020 Aussie Backyard Bird Count, which ran from…
Teaching humans to hibernate
The idea of making astronauts hibernate on long space missions often appears in science fiction, but now it is one step closer to reality. Scientists from the University of Tsukuba in Japan have…
Solar panels that sweat…
Engineers across the world are searching for way to improve the efficiency of solar panels. As new materials and designs are tested, any efficiency improvement – even a few percent – is announced…
Martian colonists could live in ancient volcanic lava tunnels
Scientists have discovered the safest place to build a permanent base on Mars: lava tunnels created by volcanoes that are now extinct. Unlike Earth, Mars does not have a magnetic field that protects…
Japanese scientists revive mammoth cells (and other mammoth news)
Japanese scientists have extracted cell nuclei from the bone marrow of a 28,000-year-old mammoth and inserted them into mouse egg cells. Subsequently, they observed that the cell nuclei showed signs of division, but…
Our ancestors hunted a Siberian unicorn
A prehistoric rhinoceros nicknamed the Siberian unicorn roamed the tundra when modern man arrived in the region, according to new research. The rhino with the Latin name of Elasmotherium sibiricum weighed more than…
Two human species shared the same cave
The two human species to which we are most closely related lived close to each other for thousands of years. This has been established by archaeologists from the University of Wollongong in NSW,…
