ScienceDaily: Strange Science News

Jet packs, robot maids and flying cars were all promises for the 21st century. We got mechanized, autonomous vacuum cleaners instead. Now a team of Penn State researchers are exploring the requirements for electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles and designing and testing potential battery power sources.

Bdelloid rotifers are multicellular animals so small you need a microscope to see them. Despite their size, they're known for being tough, capable of surviving through drying, freezing, starvation, and low oxygen. Now, researchers have found that not only can they withstand being frozen, but they can also persist for at least 24,000 years in the Siberian permafrost and survive.

An international team of scientists has used the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) to study a representative sample of galaxies, both disc and spheroidal, in a deep sky zone in the constellation of the Great Bear to characterize the properties of the stellar populations of galactic bulges.

A more reliable way of estimating the size of megalodon shows the extinct shark may have been bigger than previously thought, measuring up to 65 feet, nearly the length of two school buses.

No one knows what happened in the universe for its first 400,000 years, but a new paper suggests discovering the hypothetical particle axion could shed light on the early history of the universe. What's more, current dark matter experiments may have already detected it in its data.

In network science, the famous 'friendship paradox' describes why your friends are (on average) more popular, richer, and more attractive than you are. But a slightly more nuanced picture emerges when we apply mathematics to real-world data.