ScIence

The Northern Lights take on the form of the legendary bird over Iceland

On these astonishing photos of the Northern Lights, we can see the Lights taking the shape of a Phoenix (the majestic bird from Ancient Greek folklore). The photograph was taken by photographer Hallgrimur P. Helgason in Kaldarsel, on which the giant wings and bird-like profile were clearly visible and blew the visitors away. According to Helgason, 64-years-old, he saw the Phoenix shape an hour

Stunning Iridescent Clouds Captured In Rare Sighting on Siberian Peak

If you enjoy seeing Mother Nature’s finest work, then you’re going to love this rare spectacle seen on a mountain in Siberia. Local photographer Svetlana Kazina was the lucky one who caught the rare natural phenomenon on camera. The images show thin clouds resembling soap bubbles in their many vibrant colours. Cloud iridescence or irisation is a colorful optical phenomenon that occu

Math Genius Has Devised a Wildly Simple New Way to Solve Quadratic Equations

If you studied algebra in high school (or you're learning it right now), there's a good chance you're familiar with the quadratic formula. If not, it's possible you repressed it. By this point, billions of us have had to learn, memorise, and implement this unwieldy algorithm in order to solve quadratic equations, but according to mathematician Po-Shen Loh from Carnegie Mellon University, there'

Betelgeuse Looks Fainter Than Usual. Could It Mean It’s About to Go Supernova?

Have you noticed that Orion the Hunter – one of the most iconic and familiar of the wintertime constellations – is looking a little… different as of late? The culprit is its upper shoulder star Alpha Orionis, aka Betelgeuse, which is looking markedly faint, the faintest it has been for the 21st century. When will this nearby supernova candidate pop, and what would it look like if it did?

Man Keeps Rock For Years, Hoping It’s Gold. It Turned Out to Be Far More Valuable

In 2015, David Hole was prospecting in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia. Armed with a metal detector, he discovered something out of the ordinary – a very heavy, reddish rock resting in some yellow clay. He took it home and tried everything to open it, sure that there was a gold nugget inside the rock - after all, Maryborough is in the Goldfields region, where the Austra

Physicist Proposes Radical New ‘Stellar Engine’ That Could Move Our Entire Solar System

As far as hypothetical space megastructures go, the stellar engine is one of our favourites – a gigantic contraption built with the purpose of transporting our Solar System somewhere else, if we ever need to move to a different cosmic neighbourhood. Now, new research has put forward another idea for what such a radical stellar engine might look like. Via this beautiful video from Kurzgesag

Satellite Photos Prove The Arctic Ice Cap Is Drastically Shrinking

Climate change, global warming, El Niño, or whatever else people have heard it called in the last two decades has been a massively divisive discussion. Some believe that the entire thing was simply a hoax made up by China in order to somehow make U.S. manufacturing less competitive. Meanwhile, almost the entire scientific community of the world has shown time and time again that climate change

NASA Releases Time-Lapse Of the Disappearing Arctic Polar Ice Cap

NASA posted this video to YouTube with this description: “Arctic sea ice has not only been shrinking in surface area in recent years, it’s becoming younger and thinner as well. In this animation, where the ice cover almost looks gelatinous as it pulses through the seasons, cryospheric scientist Dr. Walt Meier of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center describes how the sea ice has undergone fund

Thickest sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has lost 95% of its mass in 35 years

The oldest and thickest Arctic sea ice – dubbed the last Arctic ice refuge – is now thought to be disappearing twice as fast as ice in the rest of the Arctic Ocean. A new time-lapse video (below), created by the American Geophysical Union, shows the age of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean north of Greenland since 1984, shortly after reliable satellite observations began. As you can clearl

NASA Scientists Detect Huge Thermonuclear Blast Deep in Space

NASA recently detected a massive thermonuclear explosion coming from outer space. The culprit seems to be a distant pulsar, the space agency reports, which is the stellar remains of a star that blew up in a supernova but was too small to form a black hole. NASA spotted the burst because it sent out an intense beam of x-rays that got picked up by the agency's orbital observatory NICER. All in