Drone footage has captured the social lives of southern resident killer whales like never before, and their friendships look surprisingly similar to our own. Tracking a single pod of 22 killer whales for 10 days, researchers observed a complex web of relationships, including close friendships. Resident killer whales live their whole lives in the same
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Fear is a common response to darkness, especially in children, and now scientists think they might have figured out the brain mechanisms behind it, mechanisms that work in a couple of areas of the brain in particular. The amygdala section of the brain is responsible for processing emotion and regulating our fear response, and a
When heat waves hit, people start looking for anything that might lower the temperature. One solution is right beneath our feet: pavement. Think about how hot the soles of your shoes can get when you’re walking on dark pavement or asphalt. A hot street isn’t just hot to touch – it also raises the surrounding
Our traditional idea of a river, an endlessly flowing stream of water, needs a rethink, scientists argue in a new study. Even when a river runs dry, they say, it’s still a river. These winding watercourses shouldn’t have to flow all year round to receive our attention and protection. In fact, most of them don’t. In
When the Black Death ravaged Europe midway through the 14th century, it wiped out around half of the population with deaths so swift, people had to bury countless victims in mass graves. At least that’s the story archaeological remains have told us until now. Researchers have just unearthed new evidence suggesting mass burials are only
Deep below the ocean’s waves, ancient tracks left by a long-hidden migration are etched into the submerged landscape of the seafloor. These mysterious imprints were not made by deep-sea creatures moving from one place to the next, but rather by a flotilla of ancient icebergs drifting aimlessly for thousands of miles across the ocean. As
As we gain greater ability to peer deeper and deeper into the Universe, we’ve been finding something very surprising: Supermassive black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, before the Universe was even 10 percent of its current age. This is quite the cosmological conundrum. Given what we know about the
One of the key steps to mitigating climate change is to better understand the multitude of factors that affect our planet’s temperature – and a new study reveals the important role that ocean microbes play in the process. Microbes are responsible for most of Earth’s naturally produced methane, a key greenhouse gas that contributes to
MacArthur Genius and MIT professor Linda Griffith has built an epic career as a scientist and inventor, including growing a human ear on a mouse. She now spends her days unpacking the biological mechanisms underlying endometriosis, a condition in which uterus-like tissue grows outside of the uterus. Endometriosis can be brutally painful, is regularly misdiagnosed
Even predators can’t stay awake all the time. But sharks, those sleek hunters of the deep, don’t exactly advertise when they’re taking a power nap. A strange behavior has given them up, though. Marine biologists have discovered that sharks ‘surf’ ocean currents in a conveyor belt configuration, allowing them to take turns resting. The revelation
Thousands of years of history tell us drought is nothing new. Sometimes we prevail. Often we don’t. A bleak look into the future tells us we’ve seen nothing yet, with a mix of shifting climates, poor water management practices, and growing population densities promising a ‘pandemic‘ of catastrophic droughts awaits. The UN’s Special Report on Drought
Getting rid of hiccups is no easy feat. Once your diaphragm starts involuntarily spasming, there’s little you can do to stop the ensuing “hupps” and “hics” other than wait it out. If you want to speed up the process, you can always try holding your breath, drinking upside down, sucking on a lemon, or eating
Insects are the most numerous group of animals on the planet. There are an estimated 5.5 million species, 80 percent of which remain to be discovered. Yet insects are experiencing steep, widespread declines across the world: a “death by a thousand cuts” because of human activity. Insects perform almost every role imaginable in an ecosystem,
The Universe is a large place, and there are a lot of large things in it. Not just galaxies, but groupings of galaxies, and the cosmic web that connects them all together. Scientists have just discovered what appears to be one of these groupings, and it could have serious implications for our understanding of the
A giant ‘murder hornet’ has just been found in a new part of the United States. The dead insect was discovered in a county of Washington state just north of Seattle by a member of the public in early June. DNA testing has since confirmed it is an Asian giant hornet, or Vespa mandarinia. Because
Charles Darwin was a careful scientist. In the middle of the 19th century, while he was collecting evidence for his theory that species evolve by natural selection, he noticed it didn’t explain the fancy tails of male peacocks, the antlers paraded by male deer, or why some the males of some species are far larger
The first astronauts arrived at China’s new space station on Thursday in the country’s longest crewed mission to date, a landmark step in establishing Beijing as a major space power. The trio blasted off on a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan launch centre in northwest China’s Gobi desert, and their craft docked around seven
Very rarely is anything completely still. All normal matter in the Universe is made of humming particles, minding their own business and vibrating at their own frequencies. If we can get them to slow down as much as possible, the material enters what is known as the motional ground state. In this state, physicists can
Once thought extinct, giant coelacanths have been lurking in the ocean for hundreds of millions of years. The rarity and deep habitat of these fish has made them difficult to study, but a new look at one of the species has now revealed it might live much longer than we thought. How long? Well, these fish
A 26.5 million-year-old skull found in northwest China has been identified as another extinct species of giant rhino, one of the largest mammals to ever roam the land. The fossil is remarkably well-preserved, and after close analysis, scientists have named it Paraceratherium linxiaense, the sixth species of this hornless rhino genus to be uncovered in
Let me introduce you to Ophiojura, a bizarre deep-sea animal found in 2011 by scientists from the French Natural History Museum, while trawling the summit of a secluded seamount called Banc Durand, 500 metres below the waves and 200 kilometres east of New Caledonia in the southwest Pacific Ocean. Ophiojura is a type of brittle
In the far reaches of the Universe, a supermassive black hole is throwing a tantrum. It’s blowing a tremendous wind into intergalactic space, and we’re seeing the storm light from 13.1 billion years ago, when the Universe was less than 10 percent of its current age. It’s the most distant such tempest we’ve ever identified,
Stunning photographs of vast, ghostly spider webs blanketing the flood-affected region of Gippsland in Victoria have gone viral online, prompting many to muse on the wonder of nature. But what’s going on here? Why do spiders do this after floods and does it happen everywhere? The answer is: these webs have nothing to do with
Speculation has been rife about the contents of an unclassified report set to be released later this month from the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) task force. The document, expected to drop on June 25, will supposedly provide a comprehensive summary of what the US government knows about UAPs – or, to use the more popular
It’s not just seeds that are being stashed away at the poles – scientists are also preserving stacks of ancient ice for future research, and the oldest ice in the Alps region has now been successfully extracted, ready for storage in Antarctica. What makes saving and storing this ice so important is the climate history
Despite us having mapped and categorized so much of mammal biology already, there are still new surprises lying in wait. Now, scientists have found two new types of glia – a type of support cell – in mouse brains. Glial cells are usually thought of as the support act in the brain and the spinal cord, adding
It’s official: Betelgeuse sneezed and caught a cold. The cause of the star’s mysterious drop in brightness was caused by a giant cloud of dust, ejected from the red supergiant – but it could only do so because the star’s changing temperature allowed it. Betelgeuse’s Great Dimming, as the event has come to be known,
The tipping point for irreversible global warming may have already been triggered, the scientist who led the biggest-ever expedition to the Arctic warned on Tuesday. “The disappearance of summer sea ice in the Arctic is one of the first landmines in this minefield, one of the tipping points that we set off first when we
One of the best studied plants in science is a small, unassuming weed. Thale cress, or Arabidopsis thaliana, is a model organism, which basically makes it the lab rat of the plant world. Therefore, it’s quite surprising that researchers have found a whole new part of the Arabidopsis plant which we’d somehow missed for over 100 years.
Although the night sky changes very little on human timescales, the Universe is not a static place. We wheel about in motion around the galactic center. Stars are born, and die in violent explosions. Galaxies collide. And, for the first time, astronomers have just found evidence that some of the largest structures in the cosmos
The novel coronavirus may have already arrived in the US by late December 2019, adding to the evidence that the virus was already lurking here at least a month before the country’s first reported case, according to a new study. The study researchers analyzed more than 24,000 blood samples collected in the US from January 2 to
Say hello to Gunggamarandu maunala, or the “hole-headed river boss” – the biggest extinct croc yet found in Australia, and an important addition to the jigsaw of crocodylian evolution. The newly named species, known from a partial skull that was unearthed in Queensland’s Darling Downs region, belongs to a group called the tomistomines. Before this,
The main signs of COVID-19 are fever, a cough, fatigue and a loss of your sense of taste and smell. Signs of COVID-19 in the skin have been noted too. But there’s another part of the body where the virus appears to have an impact: the fingernails. Following a COVID-19 infection, for a small number
We’re all familiar with songs getting stuck in our head while we’re awake, but it turns out this can happen during sleep as well. A new study investigating the phenomenon indicates that earworms invading our brains at night could cause problems in getting to sleep and staying asleep. “Our brains continue to process music even
Earth has finally attained popular recognition for its fifth ocean, with a decision by the National Geographic Society to add the Southern Ocean around Antarctica to the four it recognizes already: the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and Arctic oceans. Although the designation of the frigid waters around the icy southern continent as a separate ocean has kicked around
Last year, a tiny fossil became big news. Trapped inside ancient amber, scientists thought they’d found the skull of a minuscule, hummingbird-like dinosaur with pointy teeth, bulging eyes, and surprisingly robust bones. It was like no ancient bird or dinosaur ever discovered before. That’s because it was actually neither. A similar skeleton found in the same
We now have a three-dimensional map of one of the boundaries of the Solar System. For the first time, astronomers have been able to determine the shape of the heliosphere, the boundary that marks the end of the influence of our star’s solar wind. This discovery could help us better understand the environment of the
At the mercy of natural selection since the dawn of life, our ancestors adapted, mated and died, passing on tiny genetic mutations that eventually made humans what we are today. But evolution isn’t bound strictly to genes anymore, a new study suggests. Instead, human culture may be driving evolution faster than genetic mutations can work. In this
New insights into the peopling of Siberia and human migration into the Americas have been found in what might seem like an unlikely place: gut bugs. Helicobacter pylori is a type of bacterium that lives in people’s digestive tracts and can cause stomach ulcers. It has evolved alongside (and inside) humans for at least the
If we’re going to tackle our microplastic pollution problem, then we need a better understanding of where these fragments and particles are – and a new study suggests that adapting satellite measurements could be one way of doing just that. At the moment, estimates of microplastics in the ocean rely on trawling specific areas with
Height varies dramatically between individuals. The tallest person ever measured was 2.72 meters (6.9 feet) tall, whilst the shortest person stood at just 67 centimeters (26 inches). We often consider our height as being unchangeable, determined by our genetic make-up from when we were conceived. After all, tall parents usually have tall children and vice
Rocket launches are noisy affairs, for sure, but the sounds they produce aren’t all audible to the human ear. As rockets leave Earth they generate infrasound, low-frequency sound waves that need special instruments to detect. And scientists have indeed been detecting them. A new study details infrasounds from 1,001 rocket launches, including Space Shuttles, Falcon
As human languages are driven to extinction around the world, a verbal encyclopedia of medical knowledge is on the brink of being forgotten. Among 12,495 medicinal uses for plants in indigenous communities, new research has found over 75 percent of those plants are each tied to just one local language. If these unique words trickle out
It’s hard to tell what’s lurking out there, in the dark voids between the stars. Evidence, however, suggests the existence of a vast population of rogue exoplanets, set adrift and tethered to no star. Far from the live-giving warmth a star provides, these lonely exoplanets are unlikely to be habitable. Their moons might be another
Camouflage techniques can usually be relied upon to conceal humans and animals alike, but expertly trained individuals can see through these visual tricks – and scientists have now learned more about how this works. Not only are trained camouflage breakers able to detect that something is hidden in a scene, they’re able to correctly assess
Humans are driving the extinction of our closest relatives on planet Earth, and if we don’t change our behavior, we may be the last great ape standing. In the worst-case scenario, where human emissions and land use continue as usual, researchers predict a 94 percent loss of great ape habitat in Africa by 2050. Even
Healthy “space pups” were born from freeze-dried mouse sperm that orbited the planet for nearly six years aboard the International Space Station (ISS), according to a new study. That’s good news because DNA-damaging radiation on the ISS is more than 100 times stronger than on Earth. Beyond the ISS, which is still shielded from some radiation by our
Imagine you’re walking into a forest, and you roll over a fallen log with your foot. Fanning out on the underside, there is something moist and yellow – a bit like something you may have sneezed out, if that something was banana-yellow and spread itself out into elegant fractal branches. What you’re looking at is
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