List of All Articles with Tag 'science'

Fire-ravaged Greece is the focus of Mediterranean heat, with temperatures set to climb back up to 47C (116.6F)

Conspiracy theorists have been turning their attention to Antarctica more than you’d expect over recent years. First, there was the case of the “bleeding waterfalls”, which remains one of the strangest natural phenomena you're likely to see, and there’s also the mystery of a so-called “pyramid” which has been found on the continent. Only, it’s not a pyramid at all – in fact, it’s a mountain. The Ellsworth Mountains are the highest mountain range in Antarctica and stretch 400km and the mountain in question was discovered by the British Antarctic Expedition of 1910-1913 Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter It was called “The Pyramid” to keep the true nature of the discovery hidden from others at the time. Over the last hundred years, however, people have been speculating about the true nature of the location (even though it’s very much a mountain, poking up out of the ice) and now a second interesting geographical feature has bee discovered and got them talking all over again. The location in question is found at the coordinates 79°58’39.25?S 81°57’32.21?W, which has been a much-searched spot on Google Earth. Speaking to IFL Science, geologist at the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, Dr Mitch Darcy, said: “The pyramid-shaped structures are located in the Ellsworth Mountains, which is a range more than 400 km long, so it’s no surprise there are rocky peaks cropping out above the ice. The peaks are clearly composed of rock, and it’s a coincidence that this particular peak has that shape. “It’s not a complicated shape, so it’s not a special coincidence either. By definition, it is a nunatak, which is simply a peak of rock sticking out above a glacier or an ice sheet. This one has the shape of a pyramid, but that doesn’t make it a human construction.” So, the new location is just that – a mountain poking out the top of the ice in Antarctica, and not a mysterious pyramid at all. Antarctica has been the subject of more than its fair share of speculation recently, after conspiracy theorist Eric Hecker described the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station by the south pole as an “air traffic control” hub for aliens earlier this year. Hecker claimed that in 2010 Raytheon, the US aerospace and defence conglomerate chose him to be a contractor on the research centre operated by the United States National Science Foundation. There was “much more” to the station that first met the eye, according to Hecker. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Is there life on Mars? Well, according to new research, an alien crash landing there could explain puzzling new findings on the surface of the Red Planet. It comes after Nasa’s Curiosity Rover captured images of spiked protrusions on the surface back in April. The strange formations captured in the pictures seem to show a row of spikes and sharp angles emerging from rocks at the base of the Gale Crater, which is 154km long. The odd discovery has put scientists on high alert and it marks one of the most peculiar things ever recorded on the surface of Mars. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Astrobiologist Dr Nathalie Cabrol, who is from the NASA Ames Research Centre and Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, even said that it’s the “most bizarre” rock she’s seen in 20 years of studying the planet. The findings are so irregular, in fact, that experts cannot rule out the idea that they’re extraterrestrial in origin. “A fragment from an extraterrestrial or terrestrial spacecraft cannot be discounted with absolute certainty” the authors of new research published in the Journal of Astrobiology stated. The odd protrusions could be “sand spikes”, which form in certain sands as a result of strong earthquakes. Another theory posits that the formation could be debris from crashed spacecraft, and authors of the study have not ruled out that it could be the result of crafts launched by humans landing on the surface. "Given that possibly 10 or more craft have crashed upon the surface, coupled with the jettison of equipment associated with landing the rovers, it is possible the spikes and its substrate are human-made and consist of debris that fell onto the surface of Gale Crater," the paper reads. “Nevertheless, no debris field is evident and no evidence of any additional debris that may have originated on Earth. “Given its small size and that there are no known human-made analogs and no logical explanation as to what purpose these spikes may serve, it does not seem likely these specimens are the remnants of craft or equipment that fell into Gale Crater. One can only speculate about extraterrestrial origin." However, speaking to The Telegraph, Prof Richard Armstrong, of Aston University, Birmingham said: “There is no way of proving for certain what the spikes are but the balance of the evidence would suggest ‘sand spikes’ resulting from seismic activity on Mars.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Elon Musk’s decision to change the Twitter logo to an X has been mocked for looking like a porn site, with pictures to prove it. Since his takeover of the social media platform Twitter, Musk has made multiple significant changes that have left users baffled. Some changes affect the way users are able to interact with others, based on their verified (i.e. paid for) status, while other changes are more superficial. The latest idea has seen Musk change the iconic blue bird logo of 15 years, replacing it with a white X on a black background that many have compared with porn sites. Porn sites such as XVideos and XNXX feature logos that are variations of the letter X and comedian Jesse McLaren pointed out how true the comparisons are after sharing a screenshot of a Google Chrome page with six tabs all bearing logos that are very similar. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter McLaren wrote: “These are all porn except one. That one's Twitter.” The tweet has been viewed over 4 million times and sparked a conversation about the design of the logo. Someone commented: “It’s the fact that if I had to guess which one out of these was a porn site, my immediate first guess would be the Twitter one.” Another said: “I have a feeling that this will become an interesting case study in marketing and branding classes.” “Unethical, degrading, and perverted. Also there are some porn sites there I guess,” one Twitter user joked. Someone else argued: “Twitter is a porn site too.” Industry experts have cast doubt over Musk’s rebrand decision, particularly at a time when other competitors such as Meta’s Threads have entered the market. Mike Proulx, research director at the analysis firm Forrester, told the Guardian: “By changing Twitter’s app name, Elon Musk will have singlehandedly wiped out over 15 years of a brand name that has secured its place in our cultural lexicon.” He continued: “This is an extremely risky move, because with ‘X’, Musk is essentially starting over while its competition is afoot.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

An NHS doctor and TikTok star has revealed the most dangerous sex position – which he says is the cause of 50% of penis fractures. Dr Karan Rajan, a surgical doctor, shares his experience and knowledge with his 5.1 million followers on TikTok. In a video which has recently gone viral, Dr Karan told his followers about the sex position he thinks is most likely to lead to a hospital visit. He gives the title to the reverse cowgirl, as if there is any erratic thrusting during intercourse or if the two parties are not in sync, the penis can slip out and be crushed by their partner's pubic bone, causing a fracture. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Although the penis is boneless, the word 'fracture' is used to describe a tear in the tunica albuginea - a piece of fibrous tissue that connects the framework of the testis and allows the penis to enlarge during an erection. Patients who suffer from a ‘penile fracture’ and don’t have treatment, are usually left with erectile dysfunction, scarring and a permanent curvature of the penis for the rest of their lives. Dr Karan finished his educational video with a warning that over-enthusiastic sex, can lead to your penis really looking like an aubergine. @dr.karanr Reply to @budsfn the one with the broken 🍆 #schoolwithdrkaran #learnontiktok #doctor #storytime The popular clip was posted back in 2021 but has recently gone viral, garnering millions of views and racking up 411,000 likes. Many of Dr Karan’s followers were saddened by the educational video, with one saying: “This is my favourite position,” followed by a sad face emoji. Someone else commented: “They can just break, did I hear...well now I can finally take revenge." Another viewer said: “My husband is now scared to come near me because of that.” A fourth added: “But that’s the best position." Dr Karan answered people who wanted evidence for these claims and said: “Men coming to the emergency room with this issue.” Some people were rather concerned, and one asked: “Just to clarify, by breaking it, will it look swollen and bigger? How long will this swelling last? Asking for a friend.” Another person wrote: “I heard mine crack from this position once." Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Elon Musk's time at Twitter is going from bad to worse. The tech mogul has introduced a number of changes that have annoyed people since he bought the website last year, from making users pay for their blue ticks to letting controversial figures rejoin the platform. His latest crime is changing the iconic bird logo to an 'X' and people are fuming about it. So much so that it is driving people away from the platform into the arms of other social media apps. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter With that in mind, those social media platforms waiting with open arms are making changes to their offering, and it looks like they are trying to replicate the Twitter experience. TikTok, for instance, has announced the introduction of text-only posts, which users will also be able to add coloured backgrounds and stickers to, and which have a limit of 1,000 words. It follows Threads, Instagram’s text-based app, which was launched earlier this month. While Threads saw 100 million people sign up in fewer than five days after its launch, the number of active daily users has since fallen by 70 per cent, Forbes reports. The moral of this story? Don't mess with a beloved social media app - people will only get annoyed. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

We didn’t think it was possible, but Elon Musk’s tenure at Twitter took an even stranger turn this week after he rebranded the social media platform to “X” out of the blue. It turns out Musk has been obsessed with naming things after the letter all his career, but it still came as a big surprise that he decided to change the name of an internationally recognised brand overnight to something that sounds more like a porn site or gentleman’s club. The logo is a pretty generic graphic, which replaced the famous blue Twitter bird after Musk crowdsourced ideas from users last weekend. It’s left people with more questions than answers at this point – one of them surrounds the issue of Microsoft and potential disputes over the letter “X” as a trademark. “X” is pretty common in names of companies and organisations and the likes of Meta and Microsoft reportedly have intellectual property rights around the letter “X”. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter In fact, as Reuters reports, the likelihood is that Twitter – now "X" – could well face legal action over the name change. "There's a 100 per cent chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this by somebody," said trademark attorney Josh Gerben. According to Gerben, there are close to 900 active U.S. trademark registrations surrounding the letter “X”. Microsoft does indeed have an X trademark which it’s held since 2003. However, it’s related to communications about its Xbox video game system. Meta Platforms also owns a trademark for an “X”, which is related to software and social media. According to Gerben, the two companies are unlikely to sue over the Twitter name change unless they believe the move encroaches on their brand equity. Douglas Masters, who is a trademark attorney at law firm Loeb & Loeb, said [via Reuters]: "Given the difficulty in protecting a single letter, especially one as popular commercially as 'X', Twitter's protection is likely to be confined to very similar graphics to their X logo. "The logo does not have much distinctive about it, so the protection will be very narrow." Social media user Keith Edwards posted on the topic by uploading a screen grab of Microsoft’s 2003 patent for “X”, writing: “Microsoft owns the trademark for X. This is just too good.” A community note was added to the post which read: Microsoft only holds this trademark for videogame-related services; this wouldn't affect Twitter. “However, Meta holds the ‘X’ trademark for ‘online social networking services... social networking services in the fields of entertainment, gaming and application development…’” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

A new planet has been discovered and apparently it is pretty fluffy - like candy floss. The exoplanet, WASP-193b, was discovered 1,232 light-years away and while it's nearly 50 percent bigger than Jupiter, it's light and fluffy making it as dense as the sweet treat. According to a team led by astronomer Khalid Barkaoui of the University of Liège in Belgium, the planet orbits a Sun-like star named WASP-193. This star is around 1.1 times the mass and 1.2 times the radius of the Sun and is very close to the Sun in temperature and age. The planet orbits the star around once every 6.25 days. Barkaoui and his colleagues also found its radius is around 1.46 times the radius of Jupiter. But its mass is incredibly small by comparison: just 0.139 times Jupiter's. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter From these properties, the researchers derived the exoplanet's density: 0.059 grams per cubic centimeter. This is a lot less dense than other planets like Jupiter and Earth. And as a point of comparison, cotton candy has a density of 0.05 grams per cubic centimeter which is why they made the link. There are few other examples of a planet like this existing but its close proximity to a star may give an indication as to how it came to exist as its heat is likely to have warmed up the planet's puffy atmosphere, which is mostly made up of hydrogen and helium. This state of the planet is only set to last for around a few ten million years as the temperatures and winds emitted from the star are only likely to strip back the atmosphere further. Due to this scientists cannot fully recreate or determine what is causing WASP-193b's unique atmosphere but is it likely to be a continued source of study to try and determine the cause of this phenomenon. You probably won't find this planet sold at fairgrounds any time soon though. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Scientists have discovered one of the strangest exoplanets ever that is so light and fluffy that it is actually being compared to candyfloss (or cotton candy if you are American). The planet is called WASP-193b and is 1,232 light-years away and was discovered by researchers at the University of Liège in Belgium. The findings of their study, led by astronomer Khalid Barkaoui has been published on arXiv. The planet, which is believed to be a so-called gas giant is nearly 50 per cent bigger than Jupiter and is orbiting a Sun-like star named WASP-193, which the scientists believe is up to 6 billion years old. Although this star is slightly bigger than our sun it is still said to have the same temperature but compared to Earth, WASP-193b orbits its star just every 6.25 days. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter By studying the planet, Barkaoui and his team were able to determine that its density was around 0.059 grams per cubic centimetre. Earth's density per cubic centimetre for comparison, is 5.51 grams whereas candyfloss has a density of 0.05 grams. There are few other examples of a planet like this existing but its close proximity to a star may give an indication as to how it came to exist as its heat is likely to have warmed up the planet's puffy atmosphere, which is mostly made up of hydrogen and helium. This state of the planet is only set to last for around a few ten million years as the temperatures and winds emitted from the star are only likely to strip back the atmosphere further. Due to this scientists cannot fully recreate or determine what is causing WASP-193b's unique atmosphere but is it likely to be a continued source of study to try and determine the cause of this phenomenon. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Time travel, or just an illusion? Eagle eyed art lovers have spotted what appears to be a satellite in a four-century old painting of Jesus Christ. The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are depicted in the ‘Glorification of the Eucharist’, a painting by Ventura Salimbeni from 1595. But in the background is something surprising – a blue sphere with spikes sticking out of it, which some people have interpreted as Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the Earth in 1957. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Steve Mera, chairman of the Manchester Association of Paranormal Investigation & Training (MAPIT) and a paranormal specialist and lecturer, said at a conference: “You start to find a lot of religious connotation linked in with the UFO phenomenon. “This painting [the Eucharist] was painted in the 1600s and nobody ever really knew what that was a painting of, until we kind of looked at Sputnik, which was the first satellite to pass round the Earth,” he said. “What is really, really interesting is it is surprisingly similar to Sputnik, even to the point there is a little nodule there (on Sputnik) and the exact same nodule on the side there [on the object in the painting].” Clearly, Salimbeni wouldn’t have known about Sputnik. Or would he…? Mera added: "Did they somehow have knowledge of future events?" Well, we can probably assume not. Instead, experts think the ball is a representation of the so-called celestial sphere (or the universe), while the spikes indicate God’s power over it. But for conspiracy theorists, it’s yet another win for time travel. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Scientists think they have discovered a previously unknown hidden structure inside the Earth’s core that could change our understanding of our planet. In school, most of us were taught there are four main layers to the Earth’s structure: the crust, the mantle, the outer core and the inner core. What we know about the Earth’s insides has mostly derived from geologists’ knowledge and observations of volcanoes and seismic waves. But now, scientists believe that there may also be a whole extra layer hidden inside the inner core that no one knew about. Earth’s molten inner core is predicted to be around 5,000 degrees Celsius in temperature and scientists have calculated that it takes up around just 1 per cent of the planet’s total volume. The discovery of a potential fifth layer to the planet’s core came a few years ago when scientists used an algorithm to model thousands of scenarios of the inner core to observe the length of time it takes seismic waves to travel through Earth based on data by the International Seismological Centre. Sign up to our new free Indy100 weekly newsletter Scientists were able to analyse how different material properties within the inner core would affect seismic waves differently and found that some scenarios were certainly more likely than others. The algorithm showed how different materials altered the angle of seismic waves, leading them to hypothesise that there was a change of material somewhere in the inner core. Joanne Stephenson, an Australian National University geophysicist, explained: “We found evidence that may indicate a change in the structure of iron, which suggests perhaps two separate cooling events in Earth's history.” She continued: “The details of this big event are still a bit of a mystery, but we've added another piece of the puzzle when it comes to our knowledge of the Earth's inner core.” While their data isn’t conclusive, it does correlate with other similar studies that have looked into the anisotropy of the Earth’s inner core. Stephenson said: “It's very exciting - and might mean we have to re-write the textbooks!” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Elon Musk has hinted that he will today be changing the Twitter logo from its iconic blue bird which has been synonymous with the website since its inception to a solitary 'X' symbol. Late on Saturday, July 22nd or early on July 23rd (depending on where in the world you are) Musk tweeted: "And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds." Shortly after this he added: "If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we'll make (it) go live worldwide tomorrow." Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter He also hinted at what the logo might look like in a short and dramatic video snippet that showed a flickering animated 'X' symbol with some over-the-top music accompanying it. The South Africian billionaire and former richest man in the world also joined a Twitter spaces audio chat and simply replied "Yes" when he was asked about the sudden logo change before adding that "it should have been done a long time ago." Attentive listener's on the audio call also noticed that when Musk made the announcement he was playing the video game Diablo IV. Twitter has previously called its blue bird logo "our most recognisable asset" but it remains to be seen how long the new logo change will last. In April of this year, the website's logo was briefly changed to the Dogecoin dog symbol. Twitter has experienced a tumultuous time since Musk took over in 2022 with the website blighted by a number of technical issues as Musk and his new team attempted to implement changes. This has since led to many users flocking to other similar sites such as BlueSky, Mastadon and Mark Zuckerberg's new venture Threads, which registered more than 70 million sign-ups in its first 48 hours. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.