Category: Shorts

Electric Car Batteries 2021 (EV2021) With the rapid rise of electric vehicles there is concern about how we will find the raw materials to build so many batteries and what we will do with them when they are done. The answer to the first question is likely not as soon as many people expect, and…

Bennu’s asteroid return capsule The OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule reached 2,900°C (5,300°F) as it used the atmosphere to slow down – before some people on the internet were already questioning whether it might have brought alien pathogens with it. The answer to that is a big fat no. Why? Because Bennu is such a tiny…

Space Racer Charlie Duke Leaped Straight Up An earlier version of this article was published in July 2020.There’s something quite humbling in watching astronauts struggling to walk on the moon. Billions of dollars are spent to get astronauts to the moon, they spend years training, and they deliver speeches that will echo for ages, and…

Eta Carinae: The Great Eruption Twenty-21 years of observations from the Chandra X-ray Observatory have been put together to make a film of Eta Carinae. The movie traces the after-effects of an explosion so large we lack adjectives to convey its scale. For 18 years in the mid-19th century, the leaderboard of brightest stars was…

Hellenistic escort tomb in Jerusalem Researchers in Israel have uncovered the cremated remains of a high-class Greek escort from the period of Alexander the Great. Discovered by the side of a road in Jerusalem, the young woman’s remains were found alongside a series of bent iron nails and a remarkably well-preserved and rare bronze box…

Cleansers and Moisturizing Creams A new study investigates the science behind the sensation of skin feeling tight after cleansing. Researchers suspected that it involved a particular type of sensory receptor in the skin, known as mechanoreceptors, and used a combination of lab-based experiments, computer modeling, and human trial data to explore this theory. They applied…

Psilocybin (psychedelic mushrooms) Quiet quitting is an increasingly popular term for employees who want to take a break from the workday. Now, new research has identified a curious link between the use of psilocybin, from magic mushrooms, and a reduction in working overtime among employees. Benjamin A. Korman, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of…

Bohemolichas incola fossil This study is just too good to be true. A new kind of dinosaur has been discovered that has preserved stomach contents dating back 465 million years. It’s a trilobite, an extinct type of small crustacean found in the Paleozoic. And it has guts. Wait, what? Gross. No, really: check out this…

Supernumerary Robot Arms (Supernumerary Robot Arms) It’s surprisingly easy to learn to operate an extra limb, according to a new study conducted by Ekaterina Ivanova of Queen Mary University and her colleagues. They used a three-armed robot arm to test the ability of subjects to perform tasks that require more than two hands. The study…