ScIence

Dramatic pictures show lightning bolts inside volcanic ash eruption

Storm in an ash cloud: Electrifying shots of Mexican volcanic eruption show lightning bolts striking inside its ash plume Lightning flash spotted in the ash cloud of the Colima Volcano which is 301 miles west of Mexico City Strikes caused by high levels of electric charge building up as ash particles rub together Bolts can heat surrounding air to 3,000°C and melt ash in the cloud into glass

Mungo national park: where alien landscapes reveal ancient culture

The full moon rises over the Walls of China in the Mungo national park in south-west NSW. Photograph: Dee Kramer/Destination NSW From 20,000-year-old footprints to dramatic moon rises, a visit to the NSW world heritage area is a reckoning with the passage of time It has been more than 50 years since the ancient dry lake bed of Mungo revealed human remains which corroborated a truth Indigen

A Fatal Skin Disease Afflicting Dolphins Worldwide Has Been Linked to Climate Change

They're among the most popular and captivating animals in the ocean – a creature that delights at every splash or glimpse. And many are dying. A deadly skin condition, first noted in dolphins near New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, has now been formally identified by scientists. 'Freshwater skin disease', as researchers define the pathology in a new study, has afflicted coastal c

Wow! Lightning illuminates beautiful thunderstorm over Pacific Ocean

A towering thunderstorm lights up the night skies over Panama, as seen at 37,000 feet. (Photo by Santiago Borja.) A pilot of a Boeing 767 captured a stunning photograph of a thunderstorm billowing over the Pacific Ocean last month. First Officer Santiago Borja snapped the photo from the cockpit as the plane was passing near Panama at 37,000 feet en route to South America, he told Angela Fr

Mind-Blowing Cloud Formations You Probably Haven’t Seen Before

Various cloud formations might be one of the most beautiful and romantic sights in nature. Still, these masses of liquid droplets is also a complex and scientifically interesting natural phenomenon. The interesting fact is that regardless of the shape and the looks of the cloud, they’re all made of the same thing – condensed water or ice. When the sun heats the ground, warm air starts to evapo

With 194 BILLION masks and gloves used monthly, new wave of pollution hits oceans and beaches

A new, sad side effect of the pandemic is millions of pieces of discarded personal protective equipment (PPE) that is littering the planet in shocking ways. When the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world earlier this year, plunging much of the world into lockdown conditions, it seemed that nature was finally being given a major breather – so much so that breathless stories spread across

Multiple underground water reservoirs discovered on Mars, new study finds

A number of liquid bodies have been found on Mars, raising the tantalizing possibility that liquid water could exist on the Red Planet long believed to be desolate and hostile to life. A number of liquid bodies have been found on Mars, raising the tantalizing possibility that liquid water could exist on the Red Planet long believed to be desolate and hostile to life. A major new study publis

Astronomers Detect a Huge Gas Giant Orbiting a Much Smaller Dead Star

Astronomers have discovered a planet the size of Jupiter closely orbiting the smouldering remains of a dead star, the first time that an intact exoplanet has been discovered travelling around a white dwarf, according to research published Wednesday. Researchers said the fate of this giant planet, called WD 1586 b, offers a potential vision of our own Solar System when the Sun eventually ages in

Dust Determined The Early Rise of Human Civilisations More Than You’d Suspect

The spread of humans out of Africa through the Middle East may have been helped along by a very ordinary substance: dust. More specifically, the silty sediment known as loess seems to have played a crucial role in making the Southern Levant, on the east coast of the Mediterranean, such a fertile and hospitable corridor of land for our ancestors to travel through. Without this region developi

IBM Just Committed to Having a Functioning 1,000 Qubit Quantum Computer by 2023

We're still a long way from realising the full potential of quantum computing, but scientists are making progress all the time – and as a sign of what might be coming, IBM now says it expects to have a 1,000 qubit machine up and running by 2023. Qubits are the quantum equivalents of classical computing bits, able to be set not just as a 1 or a 0, but as a superposition state that can represen