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Around 43,000 years ago, the first frontmen of Homo sapiens colonised Europe. They replaced the Neanderthals in the region approximately 3,000 years later — violently, per French palaeontologist Marcellin Boule (the first person to analyse a Neanderthal). One hypothesis about…

Student Zulakha Hussain will be surprised. “I’m fed up of answering pointless questions in maths”, she wrote in a website poem. And then: “My wobbly table creaks as I write, then all of the answers go out of sight”. But,…

Tetrapods are four-limbed animals. Therefore the discovery of a “tetrapod-like” fish called Elpistostege is intriguing. The nearly complete fossil specimen says a lot about one of the most significant events in the history of life — the evolution of fishes…

When a skater glides on ice, his/her body weight is applied downward on a small area on the surface of the ice. The pressure generated is strong enough to make the ice melt at the point of contact. The friction…

Students mute their ignorance and answer questions correctly in an exam, without their ignorance being detected by teachers. Is this a possible scenario? Yes, but only in the quantum world. UQ physicist Jacqui Romero has come up with the technique….

Given that you are not a drummer, you can perform fine motor tasks only with one hand and you will struggle to play different rhythms with both hands simultaneously. Drummers, however, “can do things that are impossible for untrained people”….

Pregnant women may take heed. Poor diet during the pregnancy may program their babies to become couch potatoes even before they are born. And once triggered in the womb, the ‘slack snacker’ syndrome is likely to follow the offspring all…

A fossil tooth could be a buffet of information for researchers at a dig. Teeth grow like trees in a sense. They add layer after layer of enamel and dentine tissues every day. And so they can help us reconstruct…

In a thought experiment of historian Yuval Noah Harari, a hypothetical government insists that every citizen should wear a biometric bracelet. This device monitors body temperature and heart-rate, 24 hours a day. The big data hoarded this way is analysed…

The year 2020 would go into history as the “no hugs” year — a year in which people were forced to limit the opportunities for physical contact, so as to protect themselves. There is a paradox in it because physical…

Sometimes we need extreme measures to keep things at bay. And right now the world needs a “North-European Enclosure Dam” (NEED) to protect more than 25 million Europeans against the ravages of an expected sea-level rise of several metres over…

Godzilla pops up in the Big Apple after viciously handling some ships and leaving a few imposing footprints on tropical islands. It stops by Madison Square Garden, stops to visit the Chrysler Building, goes on a walk through Central Park,…