Here's something that'll warm your heart in a week that needs more heartwarming stories: Photographer Matej Peljhan photographed a boy named Luka who suffers from muscular dystrophy doing things he dreams about doing but his body won't allow him to. Like playing basketball or skateboarding or diving. It's beautiful. Read More >>

This is actually a pretty great thought experiment. At first it might seem kind of pointless to talk about what would happen if the sun vanished, but it doesn't actually result in the immediate destruction of everything. Which is weird. Vsauce walks through a pretty nuanced description of how earth's natural systems would slowly fail, but over weeks and even years, not seconds. The cold would get us in the end, but extremophiles that live in deep sea volcanoes and thermal vents could survive for billions of years. If you're not heliocentric and human-centric things don't look so bleak. [Vsauce] Read More >>

After analysing rock samples collected by the Curiosity Rover, NASA has made an exciting discovery: Conditions on a newly discovered grey (instead of red) part of Mars show it had conditions that were "once were favourable for life." It's an incredible breakthrough. Read More >>

When I hear that someone died in some freak accident that involves fireworks or pavements or parked cars or wild animals, I wonder to myself, what the hell are the odds of that freaking happening? The good thing? They're pretty high! The bad thing? It really, really sucks for that poor soul who's 1 in 50,729,141 to die from fireworks or 1 in 25,364,571 to die from a bee sting. Read More >>

Have you ever wondered how many heartbeats an average person has in their lifetime? What about for cats or dogs or other animals? Turns out because of metabolic rates and size of different species, each animal gets around a billion beats. Read More >>

Man-made life is a thing of fiction, relegated to things like Frankenstein. But scientists are coming close to something almost like it. New light-affected crystals developed by scientists at New York University are very close to being alive, so close it makes you question what "being alive" really means. Read More >>

NPR's Robert Krulwich has a whimsical piece on the one formula that rules it all, from unicellular organisms to whales and sequoias and humans. A maths formula that governs our life and tells us when to die. Read More >>

The internet is awash with news that NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has detected carbon compounds on Mars. Some people may have you believe that the news suggests there's life on Mars — but don't get too excited just yet. Read More >>

Truly! There is absolutely no age cut-off for learning a new technology. I mean, if a four-year-old can operate an iPad, there is absolutely no reason why that infant's grandmother or grandfather shouldn't be able to as well. After all, most if not all of our grandparents have used a typewriter at one point or another. And that's already a step above the kind of hands-on life experience a pre-schooler is working with. Read More >>

I spend my days on the internet, though "on" doesn't strike me as the best preposition to link myself up to the nebulous depths of the web. I live in it, maybe. Or up against it, eyeballs pressed to pixels. A little too close, maybe, but nothing life-threatening. Read More >>

Common knowledge suggests that water is the most important molecule required for life to survive. But new research shows that proteins that usually contain it can function perfectly well without it—throwing into question the perceived wisdom that water is so vital. Read More >>

All of you who are under the impression that cats are absolutely the best thing for the Internet — producing GIFs and memes galore — are bloody delusional. My 4kg house cat Franny almost destroyed a small section of your Internet last week, temporarily crippling one of the hands I use to type all your nightly posts. Read More >>

I was talking with a good friend today about, among much else, Facebook and introspection and self-image. I'm on Facebook, my friend never has been. (No, really, never.) He said he doesn't think about himself or reflect on his life nearly as much as other people (myself included) seem to. And he wondered if, maybe, his disinterest in analysing the minutiae of his life has anything to do with not having a Facebook account. Read More >>

Well here’s a turn up for the books. We apparently found life on Mars back in 1976 with NASA’s Viking mission, but it was rejected because three experiments didn’t match up. Now new data analysis has concluded that, actually, we did in fact find life on Mars, and there’s a scientific paper to prove it. Read More >>

Some interesting research on the power use of Android apps has pointed the finger at ad-supported apps for killing our phone batteries, with the software often spending more power on working out our location and downloading adverts than running the actual app itself. Read More >>