Nature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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,

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

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

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

As if Australia’s wonderful menagerie of strange beasties wasn’t already unique enough – with biofluorescing mammals that lay eggs and sweat milk - the delightful weirdness extends even to their nether regions. Take an echidna’s junk, for instance. I mean, just look at that magnificent four-tipped monstrosity! “They have to be quite well endowed to get around

The largest shark ever to swim Earth’s oceans is like a ghost in the paleontological record. Megalodon (Otodus megalodon) is known primarily in the fossil record by its giant teeth, surviving millions of years, long after its cartilage skeleton decays to nothing. It’s from these giant teeth, as big as your hand, that scientists estimate

In December 2020, in the middle of a pandemic, I made the somewhat questionable decision to fly 11,200 km (7,000 miles) from where I live in Belfast, Northern Ireland to Santiago, Chile. Then, I boarded a connecting two-hour flight and drove for a further two hours, just to experience two minutes and 20 seconds of

Some 10 million years ago, the Paratethys Sea megalake – the largest lake in Earth’s history – covered an area greater than the size of today’s Mediterranean Sea. On a modern map, it would stretch from the Alps above Italy to Kazakhstan in central Asia. Until now, little has been known about the ebb and

Constant chatter isn’t the best way to get your message across. Taking a breath before saying something important can make people listen more closely to what you have to say.  And that’s not just a trick we humans have figured out.  Frogs and birds have also been found to take purposeful pauses in their speech,

For tens of thousands of years, a microscopic creature lay frozen and immobile underground in the Siberian permafrost. Yet, when scientists thawed it out, the tiny multicellular animal didn’t just revive – it reproduced, suggesting that there is a mechanism whereby multicellular animals can avoid cell damage during the freezing process and wake up ready

When seismic waves speed through the body of our planet, they appear to travel 3 percent faster when moving vertically from pole to pole, than horizontally from east to west. New models suggest this is because Earth’s solid core is growing faster on one side, deep beneath Indonesia’s Banda Sea, and slower on the other

The world’s oldest known water was found in an ancient pool below Canada in 2016, and is at least 2 billion years old. Back in 2013 scientists found water dating back about 1.5 billion years at the Kidd Mine in Ontario, but in 2016, deeper investigation revealed an even older source buried underground. The initial discovery

More than 19 million years ago, the world’s open oceans were absolutely teeming with sharks, roughly ten times more than today. Then, suddenly, these large marine predators almost all disappeared.  This devastating and mysterious mass extinction event was only recently discovered through a series of accidental inquiries, and from the evidence we have so far,

Siberian jays are sneaky little rascals. These tiny corvids can use bird lies to try and trick other flocks into leaving a territory, so that the interlopers can move in and nick their food. But it seems that other Siberian jays (Perisoreus infaustus) are also wise to this ruse. New research has found that breeding

Being ready to interact with people is something puppies are born with, new research shows: Up to 40 percent of a young dog’s ability to communicate with us is genetic, even before any training or bonding has taken place. In other words, the friendliness that young pups are known for is partly innate – though

Discovering a new species and placing it on the tree of life is a big responsibility. I have been fortunate to name four species from some of the deepest, most remote and least sampled parts of the ocean. Each new species helps us uncover how life thrives in the hadal zone (anywhere deeper than 6,000

You can impress family members and friends with magic tricks, but you can also use them to study the differences in perception between animals and humans – and a new study highlights how Eurasian jays aren’t quite as susceptible to sleight of hand as we are. Jays and other large-brained birds often use techniques similar

A giant tortoise in the Galápagos Islands that was thought to have gone extinct over a century ago just came out of hiding. Researchers discovered the female tortoise on the Galápagos’ Fernandina Island during a joint expedition carried out by the Galápagos National Park Directorate and the Galápagos Conservancy in 2019, according to a statement. They

A potentially new species of tree frog has been discovered in New Guinea, and it’s full of surprises. For starters, instead of the bright green skin of its relatives, this creature sports a beautiful chocolate brown. It was also found in an unexpected location. “What’s a little surprising about this discovery is that the well-known

Each city is populated by a unique host of microbial organisms, and this microbial ‘fingerprint’ is so distinctive, the DNA on your shoe is likely enough to identify where you live, scientists say. In a new study, researchers took thousands of samples from mass transit systems in 60 cities across the world, swabbing common touch

For some time, seismologists have been aware of brief, subtle anomalies in underground electrical fields leading up to an earthquake, sometimes occurring as soon as a few weeks before the quake happens. It’s tempting to think these electromagnetic bursts could be used to predict when a quake will strike. Up until now, however, the cause of

A study has found that monkeys are capable of picking up new “accents” to be more friendly to their neighbors. The study, which was published earlier this month in the peer-reviewed Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology journal, looked at two different species of monkeys that live in the Brazilian Amazon: The bald-headed white pied tamarins and their

While we all recognize bees for their importance in our food chain as pollinators, the clever creatures have a series of other talents, including math ability, face recognition, and even tool use.   A new video, originally posted on Twitter, shows a pair of bees apparently unscrewing the orange lid of a Fanta to reach the

From the waters we creatures of the land emerged. Some animals, like whales, returned to it. Others, like frogs, never truly let go of their watery origins, and even now we’re still discovering clever ways in which terrestrial creatures can find refuge within this soothing liquid medium. Case in point: air-breathing anoles have developed a

Active for at least the last 700,000 years, and dominating the landscape of Hawaii, Mauna Loa is the largest shield volcano on Earth (above water, at least) – and new data have revealed more about what might be enough to set off future eruptions. Looking at shifts in the ground tracked by GPS and satellite

Gold, for all its wonderful uses, isn’t hugely abundant in Earth’s upper layers. For each ton of crust material, there’s an estimated just 0.004 grams of the precious metal. Yet somehow, there are regions that contain “bonanza” abundances – hyper-enrichment, in the scientific parlance. How these gold veins form in time spans as short as

Not all flowers smell like roses. An unusual plant in Greece gives off the scent of decaying insects, probably as a way to attract and trap coffin flies (Megaselia scalaris). The stinky flower is called Aristolochia microstoma, and according to scientists, it’s the first known case of a plant that reeks of dead invertebrates to

Pharmaceuticals, the chemicals found in medicines and drugs, are widely used across the world and allow us to treat and prevent disease. There is a growing concern that some of these pharmaceuticals are leaching into natural waterways like rivers, streams, and lakes. To find out if this poses a problem, we asked 4 experts in

The wonderful mess of molecules that make up living things is so complex, biologists have overlooked an entire class of them – until now. This missed bit of biochemistry is neither rare nor hard to find; it’s just no one had thought to look for it before. “This is a stunning discovery of an entirely

Here’s a mystery: Ancient fossils show animals originating from South America in the Antilles islands off Central America, but how did they get over the sea? The answer is via land masses that have long since sunk from view under the ocean, according to a new study. These animals certainly couldn’t have swum across several

Prepare for some dark and stormy nights (and days). This year’s Atlantic hurricane season, which begins June 1 and lasts until November 30, will bring another wave of higher- than-average storm formation, following in the footsteps of 2020’s record-shattering season, according to the latest forecast by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). On Thursday (May 20),

When it comes to dividing animals along sex lines, evolution is known for getting creative. The chromosomes that determine baby-making functions have been reinvented so often throughout the ages, it’s hard to keep track. Some groups, like mammals, are thought to be fairly consistent in how they genetically cast lots in the game of reproduction.

Death Valley in California is often said to be the hottest place on Earth, holding a blistering record of 56.7 degrees Celsius (or 134.1 degrees Fahrenheit) – but that’s just the warmth of the air. New research on Earth’s most extreme surface temperatures has found it is much worse to set foot in Iran’s Lut

An iceberg measuring about 70 times the size of Manhattan has broken off from the Ronne Ice Shelf of Antarctica, making it the current largest iceberg in the world, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Wednesday. Satellite images captured the moment it broke off from the ice sheet, shown in the tweet below: The world’s

The top of Darwin’s Arch, the famous natural stone archway in the northern Galapagos Islands, has crashed into the waves, according to news reports. The arch, located less than 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) off the steep and rocky coast of Darwin Island, collapsed as “a consequence of natural erosion,” on May 17, the Ecuador Ministry

We can now add “being fired out of a gun at high speeds” to the growing list of weird things tardigrades can survive. How do we know? Scientists actually did it – and, believe it or not, it’s for a good cause. They wanted to know if tardigrade-like organisms could survive certain conditions in space,