Weird news stories

Physicists have long struggled to explain why the Universe started out with conditions suitable for life to evolve. Why do the physical laws and constants take the very specific values that allow stars, planets, and ultimately life to develop?

Tardigrades are tiny, incredibly tough animals that can withstand a wide range of dangers, including many that would obliterate most other creatures known to science.

We think of physical reality as what objectively exists, independent of any observer. But relativity and quantum physics say otherwise.

An uncharted region of space known as the “zone of avoidance” lurks behind the Milky Way’s center – and astronomers just found an enormous, multi-galaxy structure there.

Strange libraries of supplementary genes nicknamed “Borg” DNA appear to supercharge the microbes that possess them, giving them an uncanny ability to metabolize materials in their environment faster than their competitors

One of the most bizarre phenomena in our Solar System is the strange way that Uranus spins on its side. That’s a puzzle because all the other planets spin upright. What could have happened to make Uranus so different, particularly from its neighbor Neptune, which formed at the same time in similar circumstances?

Astronomers don’t have an explanation for a black hole burping out a shredded star, but they suspect it could be more common than once thought.

More than a mile beneath the Pacific Ocean, is a seascape of oddly shaped corals and a glass sponge named after ET.

Narwhals are enigmatic marine mammals, fascinating us with their unique appearance and secretive lifestyles under the Arctic sea ice.

Tiny tardigrades can survive conditions that would kill most other forms of life. By expelling their body’s water and transforming into a seemingly lifeless ball called a tun, they enter a state of dried-up suspended animation in which they can survive for decades without food and water and withstand extreme temperatures, pressures and even the vacuum of space.

A new kind of “phase transition” in water was first proposed 30 years ago in a study by researchers from Boston University. Because the transition has been predicted to occur at supercooled conditions, however, confirming its existence has been a challenge.

It isn’t alive, and has no structures even approaching the complexity of the brain, but a compound called vanadium dioxide is capable of ‘remembering’ previous external stimuli, researchers have found.

Scientists at the University of Bristol have discovered that the vast anatomical variety of fungi stems from evolutionary increases in multicellular complexity.

A new discovery about jumping spiders could challenge some pretty hefty human assumptions about the cognitive abilities of arthropods.

Atomic clocks, combined with precise astronomical measurements, have revealed that the length of a day is suddenly getting longer, and scientists don’t know why.

A California-based organisation wants to harness the power of machine learning to decode communication across the entire animal kingdom. But the project has its doubters