Ultra-processed food is often high in fat, sugar and saltGMVozd/Getty Images Nutrition advice is often fickle. In the 1990s, nutritionists blamed fats for rising obesity rates. Then, carbohydrates became the culprit in the early 2000s. Now, the refrain is to...
Dingoes are found across most of the Australian continentDominic Jeanmaire/Getty Images/iStockphoto Analysis of ancient DNA from dingoes suggests that Australia’s native wild dogs arrived in two waves of migration between 3000 and 8000 years ago and show little evidence of...
The New York Stock Exchange on Wall StreetHans-Werner Rodrian / Alamy Cosmic ray particles capable of penetrating even the densest buildings or underground structures can provide an essentially foolproof timing system for synchronising high-frequency trades in the world’s international stock...
Self-cooling artificial turf was tested against ordinary fake grass at a test site in AmsterdamJoris Voeten An artificial sports pitch that absorbs rainwater and lets it evaporate on hot days stays much cooler than ordinary fake grass. The self-cooling turf...
The magnificent tree frog (Litoria splendida) is normally green, but this mutant is blueJ Barker/AWC A rare blue frog found in the Kimberley region of Western Australia has stunned researchers, who say the unusual colouring is probably due to a...
Savor’s synthetic butterSavor A new type of dietary fat that doesn’t require animals or large areas of land to produce could soon be on sale in the US as researchers and entrepreneurs race to develop the first “synthetic” foodstuffs. US...
Snippets of self-replicating code compete for space in a virtual environmentGoogle A self-replicating form of artificial life has arisen from a digital “primordial soup” of random data, despite a lack of explicit rules or goals to encourage such behaviour. Researchers...
Dead Planets Society is a podcast that takes outlandish ideas about how to tinker with the cosmos – from snapping the moon in half to causing a gravitational wave apocalypse – and subjects them to the laws of physics to...
Withdrawn and anxious, the mice in John Cryan’s lab were behaving like you or I might if we had experienced workplace bullying and thought we might encounter the bully again. The good news, believe it or not, was that some...
Cultured meat, with added flavourYonsei University Lab-grown meat could get a flavour boost thanks to aromatic chemicals that activate when cooked, releasing a meaty smell – or if you prefer, that of coffee or potatoes. Meat grown from cultured cells...
