Falling cats seem to twist the front half of their body first Evolve/Photoshot/ZUMAPRESS/Alamy When falling cats turn themselves the right way up before they hit the ground, they have a secret trick: a region of their spine that is exceptional at twisting. “We compared the flexibility of the thoracic spine and lumbar spine in cats,…
Artwork of a Hybodus shark, a predator that evolved in the late Permian and survived the mass extinction CHRISTIAN DARKIN/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY The worst known mass extinction wiped out over 80 per cent of marine species. But despite these huge losses, many ecosystems did not collapse, with a variety of animals and even top predators…
X and Y chromosomes can compete against each other to skew sex ratios in their favour KATERYNA KON/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY You probably know of a family where the children are almost all boys, or all girls. In most cases, it is just due to chance, but an analysis of a family in Utah going back…
Anthropic’s Claude chatbot recently had service troubles Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto/Shutterstock This week, AI chatbot Claude went down, leaving users unable to access the service via its maker Anthropic’s website, but barely a week goes by without a similar incident at a technology giant, government website or hospital. What’s causing this apparent uptick in problems? One of…
Alistair Berg/Getty Images Let’s start off with a fact: you do not, no matter what you’ve heard, eat a credit card’s worth of microplastics each week. At least, not in the course of a normal human diet. But this popular claim has raised alarm, especially as it has been followed by a flurry of studies…
For many of us, obsessing over how much sleep we get is a favourite pastime. Largely, that’s thanks to the emergence of the sleep industry, offering everything from wearable trackers to assess sleep quality to melatonin gummies that hasten slumber – but are we looking at this all wrong? Sleep rules of thumb have become…
Can magnesium supplements help with sleep or energy? Maria Korneeva/Getty Images In the 1600s, wealthy people in England flocked to a well on Epsom Common that was said to contain healing water. It had a bitter taste but a strong laxative effect that provided welcome relief from their rich, meat-heavy diets. “People coming there took…
Qunnect’s Carina rack for quantum entanglement Qunnect Mehdi Namazi wants to sell you quantum entanglement. He and his colleagues at Qunnect have spent nearly a decade building devices that make sharing quantum-entangled particles of light, or photons, practical enough to be used for unhackable communication. At Qunnect’s headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, large tables are…
Still from a promotional video for Skysurfer, a US company that sells “ultralight aircraft” for personal, recreational use Hunter Kowald/skysurferaircraft.com The first passenger-carrying drones may already be in use. These aren’t sophisticated urban air taxis, but crudely modified cargo drones transporting combat casualties and criminals. Heavy-lift drones are essentially scaled-up versions of the familiar quadcopters….
The following is an extract from our Lost in Space-Time newsletter. Each month, we dive into fascinating ideas from around the universe. You can sign up for Lost in Space-Time here. Modern physics offers a remarkable lens on reality. In just over a century, it has decoded the architecture of atoms, traced the early history of…
