Japan Releases a Range of Miniature Furniture for Cats

Recently, we’ve introduced you to a range of cat-tastic designs that demonstrate how modern cat furniture doesn’t have to be an eyesore. Cat-sized cardboard landmarks, tetris cat towers, and even a new line of IKEA pet furniture proves that furniture design for our fluffy friends is a growing trend. The newest pet-friendly designs to catch our eye is this super-chic collection by Japan’s Oka

Stonehenge Likely Built With Stones And a Design Taken From an Ancient Welsh Monument

Remains of an ancient monument in west Wales indicate stones that stood at the site may have been dismantled and used to build the Neolithic standing circle Stonehenge, a new study suggested Friday. Researchers believe some stones used at Stonehenge, near Salisbury in southwest England, were used in an earlier monument 175 miles (280 kilometres) away in southwest Wales. The team behind the d

The Full Moon Changes How People Sleep Without Us Ever Realising, Says Study

In modern times, a great deal of research has focused on the way that artificial light sources mess up our sleep and health, due to the unnatural effects of illumination after the Sun goes down. But just how unnatural is night-time light anyway? After all, humans have always been exposed to variable levels of light at night, due to reflections of sunlight from the waxing and waning Moon – and

We Just Got The First Photo of Mars From China’s Tianwen 1 Probe, And It’s Breathtaking

China's Tianwen-1 probe has sent back its first image of Mars, the national space agency said, as the mission prepares to touch down on the Red Planet later this year. The spacecraft, launched in July around the same time as a rival US mission, is expected to enter Mars orbit around February 10. The black-and-white photo released late Friday by the China National Space Administration showed

Scientists Just Confirmed The Existence of a New Crystalline Structure of Ice

Not all water ice is the same. Locked inside, the arrangement of molecules varies significantly, based on the pressure and temperature conditions under which it forms. We knew of 18 of these distinct phases of ice, some occurring naturally, some only seen in laboratory conditions. Three years ago, a team of researchers tweaked one of the existing ice structures, transforming it into a form t

Watch a Billion Years of Shifting Tectonic Plates in 40 Mesmerising Seconds

The tectonic plates that cover Earth like a jigsaw puzzle move about as fast as our fingernails grow, but over the course of a billion years that's enough to travel across the entire planet – as a fascinating new video shows. In one of the most complete models of tectonic plate movements ever put together, scientists have condensed a billion years of movement into a 40-second video clip, so w

A Physicist Has Worked Out The Math That Makes ‘Paradox-Free’ Time Travel Plausible

No one has yet managed to travel through time – at least to our knowledge – but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists. As movies such as The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future and many others show, moving around in time creates a lot of problems for the fundamental rules of the Universe: if you go back in time

Curious Test Reveals Dogs May Have a Special Ability We Didn’t Know About Before

Dogs might not be able to recognise themselves in a mirror, but that doesn't mean our pets don't have some level of self-awareness. Recent research has shown dogs can recognise the unique smell of their own odour, sort of like looking in an 'olfactory mirror', and now a new study suggests they might also have some awareness of their body as an obstacle. Body awareness is the ability to think

Gravity May Play a Tiny But Important Role in The Microworld of Particle Physics

Launch yourself from a great enough height and it won't take long to see which would win in a battle between gravity and the forces that bind solid ground. Gravity's relative weakness, at least compared to the strength of electromagnetism and the nuclear forces, appears to limits its power to phenomena on the vast scales of planets and galaxies. For this reason, together with the challenge o

Variations in Sunlight Have More to Do With Pollution Than Clouds, Says Study

The amount of sunlight reaching Earth's surface has been fluctuating for decades now, and a new study supports the idea that human activity is to blame. In the late 1980s, researchers first noticed a steady decline or 'dimming' in Earth's brightness in various parts of the world, including a near 30 percent drop in sunlight since the 1950s over a particular region in the Soviet Union. Just a