Weird news stories

This bizarre little organism doesn’t have a brain, or a nervous system – its blobby, bright-yellow body is just one cell. This slime mold species has thrived, more or less unchanged, for a billion years in its damp, decaying habitats. And, in the last decade, it’s been changing how we think about cognition and problem-solving.

The center of the Milky Way is a strange and wild place. There dwells our galactic nucleus – a supermassive black hole 4 million times the mass of the Sun, a beast named Sgr A*. It’s probably the most extreme environment in our galaxy, dominated by Sgr A*’s gravitational and magnetic fields.

The interiors of Jupiter and Saturn are actually quite difficult to probe. But Saturn’s uniquely glorious and extensive ring system is proving to be an excellent tool for figuring out the densities deep below its thick cloud layers, right down to the core.

Mars’ ancient history interests scientists because if the arid planet was once warm and wet, it may have been habitable to life. One new study about an unnamed Martian crater suggests a new possibility about Mars’ past.

That glow you see at sunrise or sunset is caused by cosmic dust. For decades astronomers thought it came from asteroids but now they’re not so sure.

A series of newly surfaced images and videos of unidentified flying objects filmed by the US Navy have now been confirmed as authentic by the Pentagon.

Spiders rely quite significantly on touch to sense the world around them. Their bodies and legs are covered in tiny hairs and slits that can distinguish between different kinds of vibrations.

New observations from the Hubble Space Telescope show the powerful astrophysical jets and stellar winds that flow from baby stars do not have the expected effect of quenching the stellar growth process. This poses quite a significant conundrum for our models of star formation.

Our solar system’s first known interstellar visitor is neither a comet nor asteroid as first suspected and looks nothing like a cigar. A new study says the mystery object is likely a remnant of a Pluto-like world and shaped like a cookie.

Stop your sobbing – because scientists can do it for you. Using stem cells, Dutch researchers have grown miniature human tear glands capable of “crying”.

If you’ve ever walked into a room, then completely forgotten what you went in there for, you’ve experienced what’s known as the doorway effect: it’s almost as if the mind blanks itself as you change location, ready for some fresh experience or input.

Researchers are building a growing (and glowing) list of fluorescent mammals, and a new addition, an endearing jumping rodent called the springhare, just leapt into the spotlight, its brown fur lighting up in swirling disco patterns of pink and orange under ultraviolet (UV) rays.

New observations of a very unusual and mysterious star located approximately 15,000 light-years away from Earth have revealed a bizarre pattern of stellar activity that astronomers say they’ve never witnessed before.

Using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, astronomers have identified two pairs of stars beyond the galaxy that are consuming their companions.

Simon Fraser University researchers have found evidence that large ambush-predatory worms–some as long as two metres–roamed the ocean floor near Taiwan over 20 million years ago.