George Dvorsky

Could This Be The ESA’s Missing Comet Lander?

After months of searching, the European Space Agency says it may have finally caught a glimpse of the missing Philae Lander on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. During its historic descent back in November 2014, the lander’s harpoons failed to properly deploy and its ice screws were not enough to secure it at its intended…

Touching Photos Show A Baby Koala Clinging To Mom While She Has Surgery

A six-month-old koala named Phantom was allowed to hold on to his mother while she was being operated on to treat a collapsed lung. As the Courier Mail reports, the pair managed to survive after being hit by a car on a highway west of Brisbane. No bones were broken, but the mother, named Lizzy,…

Here’s How An AI Ranks The Most Memorable Game Of Thrones Characters

Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have used a special algorithm to learn which characters in Game of Thrones are the easiest to remember according to visual cues alone. Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer) is the second-most memorable character on GoT, while Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson) is the 12th, so says MIT’s image…

Hubble Snaps A Gorgeous Pic Of The Universe’s Loneliest Galaxy

This is NGC 6503, a spiral dwarf galaxy located about 18 million light-years away. Dubbed the “Lost-In-Space” galaxy, it resides within the Local Void — a vast region of space that’s completely devoid of other galaxies. Virtually all galaxies are clumped into groups. The Milky Way, for example, is situated within the Local Group, an…

Unprecedented Photos Show A Polar Bear Eating Dolphins

For the first time ever, scientists have observed a polar bear catching and eating white-beaked dolphins. It’s suspected that the dolphins ventured too far north and became stranded in the ice — a possible consequence of climate change. The observation was made by Jon Aars and his colleagues from the Norwegian Polar Institute on April…

Is That A Massive Stripe Streaking Across Pluto’s Surface?

The latest image of Pluto taken by the New Horizons spacecraft may have yielded the dwarf planet’s first prominent surface feature — a dark diagonal stripe that stretches from one side to the other. New Horizons took these two images 15 seconds apart on June 6 at a distance of 45.8 million kilometers. The images…

Woman Gives Birth Using Ovarian Tissue Frozen In Childhood

In a medical first, a woman has given birth to a healthy baby boy from a transplant of her own frozen ovarian tissue preserved when she was just 13-years-old. It’s a remarkable breakthrough that’s poised to benefit young people who lose their fertility because of cancer treatments. As reported in The Telegraph, the unnamed 28-year-old…

Even Wild Chimps Like To Get Drunk Now And Then

Turns out that African apes and humans have more in common than previously thought. Observations made in the jungles of Guinea show wild chimps sipping alcoholic tree sap from leaf sponges, followed by some characteristically drunken behaviors. A 17-year investigation led by Kimberley Hockings from Oxford Brookes University and the Centre for Research in Anthropology…

Construction begins today on Washington state’s highly anticipated wildlife overpass. Measuring 150-feet long (45 meters), the bridge will allow bears, cougars, elk, and lizards to cross over the busy I-90 highway. It’s a “critical connective link” that’s expected to dramatically reduce collisions between vehicles and animals.

Here’s Why The New Horizons Spacecraft Won’t Be Stopping At Pluto

In less than five weeks, New Horizons will zip past the Pluto-Charon system in a brief but historic encounter. Given the huge interest in Pluto, it’s fair to ask: Why won’t mission planners let the probe hang out a while? Above: Our first glimpse of Pluto and Charon in color (Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied…

New Injectable Brain Implants Take Us One Step Closer To A Cyborg Future

Harvard scientists have developed an electrical scaffold that can be injected directly into the brain with a syringe. By using the technique to “cyborg”-ize the brains of mice, the team was able to investigate and manipulate the animals’ individual neurons—a technological feat the researchers say holds tremendous medical promise. Above: Bright-field image showing the mesh…

The United States Just Recorded Its Wettest Month. Ever.

In the 121 years that precipitation has been recorded in the contiguous U.S., no months were as wet as the one experienced this past May. Above: Precipitation percent of average, May 2015 (average period 20th century) (credit: NOAA). Numbers put out by the NOAA show that the May precipitation total for the continental U.S. was…

A Proportional Perspective of the World’s Native Languages

This fascinating infographic by Alberto Lucas López shows how 23 of the world’s mother tongues are proportioned, and how they’re distributed around the globe. Of the 7,102 languages around today, a mere 23 of them are the mother tongue of 50 million people or more. These select languages are spoken by a total of 4.1…

Ride Along With Dawn Spacecraft As It Swoops Around Dwarf Planet Ceres

A breathtaking new composite video tracks the journey of NASA’s Dawn spacecraft as it settles into an orbit some 2,730 miles (4,400 km) above the surface of Ceres. Dawn entered into its new orbit on June 3. The spacecraft will stay there for about a month as it continues to conduct detailed observations of the…

Watching A WWI-Era Tank Crush A Car Is Still Satisfying 100 Years Later

There’s something inherently timeless about watching a very moveable object get smushed by an unstoppable force. This British Pathé video of a tank crushing a car in Toronto in 1918 was recently discovered by graphic designer and photographer Benjamin Moogk, who writes at his blog: “Seems that the idea of crushing cars with a tank…

Scientists Use AI To Solve A Long-standing Genetics Mystery

For years, biologists have sought to understand how the genes of planarians, a group of free-living flatworms, direct growth in specific body parts. An artificial intelligence tasked with the problem appears to have cracked the code, a breakthrough that demonstrates the incredible potential for “robot science.” An artificial intelligence system devised by Daniel Lobo and…

Where Are All The Aliens? This Short Video Offers Some Solutions

In Part I of Kurz Gesagt’s animated explainer of the Fermi Paradox we learned about the vexing problem that is the Great Silence. This follow-up video presents some intriguing solutions that may explain the disturbing absence of intelligent alien life.

Watch How Animals React To A Mirror That Suddenly Appears In The Jungle

Of all the animals that exist on this planet, only a precious few have the capacity to recognize themselves in a mirror. These fascinating — and at times hilarious — videos taken by photographer Xavier Hubert-Brierre reveal the reactions of various animals as they gaze upon their reflections for the very first time. The ability…

Behold “Hellboy,” A Horned Dinosaur Unlike Any Other

Paleontologists in Alberta have described a fiercely intimidating Cretaceous Period dinosaur that featured a distinct set of facial horns and spines at the back of its skull. The new ceratopsid (horned) dinosaur was described by paleontologists Caleb Brown and Donald Henderson of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Alberta. The details of their study,…

This Animated Data Visualization Of World War II Fatalities Is Shocking

It’s difficult to conceptualize excessively large numbers, particularly when they pertain to human tragedies. But this highly-engaging animated data visualization by Neil Halloran makes WWII-related deaths all too comprehensible. The 15-minute video (it’s well worth the time to watch), titled “The Fallen of World War II,” is divided into three sections. The first is an…