Rhinos, tigers, pangolins – we’re used to hearing about the mammals that are snatched from the wild so that their body parts can be sold. But did you know that you can buy and sell 36 percent of all known reptile species over the internet? That’s more than one in three species, including the
Month: September 2020
In the gloom of subterranean tunnels, chonky little mole-rats build their nests, tucked safely away, deep inside the earth. Strangely, one species always carefully builds these nests in the south-eastern part of their den. Why they do this remains unclear, but even in total darkness, it seems, these burrowing rodents – animals that can
Decades of teasing apart Neanderthal DNA has produced an archive of ancient genes that spell out a history of love affairs between estranged branches of humanity’s family tree. Until now, the story has been rather lopsided. For whatever reason, the most well preserved material has come from female remains, leaving an entire male genetic
Some soil microbes adept at recycling plants have developed a taste for plastic. A few years ago, while fiddling with one of these highly adapted organisms, scientists accidentally created a mutant enzyme, capable of devouring 20 percent more plastic than its natural counterpart. Just two years later, the same team has once again outdone
Rampant air pollution in northern Siberia is blocking sunlight and slowing the growth of boreal forests, new research suggests The largest study of tree rings in Norilsk, Russia’s most polluted city and the northernmost city in the world, has found air pollution from local mines and smelters are at least partly to blame for a
Global warming is making the oceans more stable, increasing surface temperatures and reducing the carbon they can absorb, according to research published Monday by climate scientists who warned that the findings have “profound and troubling” implications. Man-made climate change has increased surface temperatures across the planet, leading to atmospheric instability and amplifying extreme weather
It’s a question that’s surprisingly hard to answer: why are most of us right-handed, some of us left-handed, and even fewer ambidextrous? Can we point to our genes, or is it an environmental phenomenon? A new genome-wide association study of over 1.7 million people can’t give us all the answers, but it is bringing
Tens of thousands of people were forced to flee their homes in California’s Napa and Sonoma valleys on Monday as wildfires fanned by fierce winds ripped through the world-famous wine region. Under an opaque orange sky and a sweltering heatwave, vineyards were consumed and buildings devastated by the blaze that spread at a “dangerous
An abnormally bad season of weather may have had a significant impact on the death toll from both World War I and the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, according to new research, with many more lives being lost due to torrential rain and plummeting temperatures. Through a detailed analysis of an ice core extracted from
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, toilet paper was nearly as hard to come by as personal protective equipment. Though toilet paper has existed in the Western world since at least the 16th century CE and in China since the second century BCE, billions of people don’t use toilet paper even today. In
Tarantulas don’t just come in brown and black. These large, hairy spiders can also display wonderful hues of blue, green, purple, and red. Yet tarantulas are most active at twilight, meaning they’re ‘crepuscular’ animals – where vibrant colours are significantly harder to see (at least for us). Until now, researchers didn’t know if they could even see
New research into the minds of crows has revealed a jaw-dropping finding: the canny corvids aren’t just clever – they also possess a form of consciousness, able to be consciously aware of the world around them in the present. In other words, they have subjective experiences. This is called primary, or sensory, consciousness, and
For mouthless, lungless bacteria, breathing is a bit more complicated than it is for humans. We inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide; Geobacter – a ubiquitous, groundwater-dwelling genus of bacteria – swallow up organic waste and ‘exhale’ electrons, generating a tiny electric current in the process. Those waste electrons always need somewhere to go (usually
Billions of years ago, long before oxygen was readily available, the notorious poison arsenic could have been the compound that breathed new life into our planet. In Chile’s Atacama Desert, in a place called Laguna La Brava, scientists have been studying a purple ribbon of photosynthetic microbes living in a hypersaline lake that’s permanently free
Eat or be eaten: It’s an edict of Mother Nature that connects every corner of the biosphere in a sprawling web of producers, consumers, detritivores, and scavengers. Every corner but one, it seems. Just what the hell dines on viruses? Scientists may have just discovered the answer. Given the fact that the viral biomass
No one has yet managed to travel through time – at least to our knowledge – but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists. As movies such as The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future and many others show, moving around in time creates
Wildfires are burning the West Coast, hurricanes are flooding the Southeast — and some of those storms are rising from the dead. “Zombie storms”, which regain strength after initially petering out, are the newest addition to the year 2020. And these undead weather anomalies are becoming more common thanks to climate change. “Because 2020,
The discovery of more than a thousand fossilised teeth in a prehistoric river bed is eating away at our current definition of dinosaurs. Today, palaeontologists generally consider this extinct group of reptiles to be solely land-based, but one enormous species simply won’t stay dry. The species, Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, with its giant fin-like tail, has
In the cold, dense medium of a helium-3 superfluid, scientists recently made an unexpected discovery. A foreign object travelling through the medium could exceed a critical speed limit without breaking the fragile superfluid itself. As this contradicts our understanding of superfluidity, it presented quite a puzzle – but now, by recreating and studying the
Huge volcanic eruptions 233 million years ago pumped carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapour into the atmosphere. This series of violent explosions, on what we now know as the west coast of Canada, led to massive global warming. Our new research has revealed that this was a planet-changing mass extinction event that killed off
It was very common for ancient Egyptians to be buried with mummified birds as offerings to the gods, including Horus, Ra or Thoth. In fact, the number of sacrificial birds of prey and ibis buried with Egyptian mummies is thought to reach into the millions. But up until now it hasn’t been clear whether
As the streets of San Francisco emptied out in the first months of the pandemic, the city’s male birds began singing more softly and improving their vocal range, making them “sexier” to females, according to a new study published Thursday. The paper adds to a growing body of research describing how animals – from
California Governor Gavin Newsom on Wednesday ordered all passenger vehicles sold in the state to be zero-emission by 2035 to fight climate change and smog-fouled air. The transportation sector causes more than half of California’s carbon pollution, and parts of the state are vexed by some of the most toxic air in the country, according
It’s hard to fathom that carnivorous plants exist. When Charles Darwin first described how a Venus flytrap worked, calling it “one of the most wonderful [plants] in the world”, some people simply didn’t believe him. Today, just as we’ve come to appreciate the gruesome nature of these remarkable predators – which can capture and eat
In 2013, a suffocatingly hot blob of water brewed in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of North America. It then decimated marine life. Thousands of seabirds washed up dead on shores, along with starving baby sea lions. Salmon, krill, and other marine animals vanished as the warmth fuelled a massive toxic algal bloom that
Raising Earth’s average surface temperature another degree Celsius will lock in 2.5 metres of sea level rise from Antarctica alone and an extra three degrees see the frozen continent lift oceans 6.5 metres, scientists warned Wednesday. These devastating increases in the global waterline – enough to cripple coastal cities from Mumbai to Miami and
The history of today’s stainless steel industry can be traced back to the early 19th century, when scientists noticed iron-chromium alloys resisted corrosion by certain acids. New research, however, suggests a similar alloy was being developed much, much earlier than this – even as far back as a thousand years ago. Archaeologists have found what they
Earth’s lost eighth continent, Zealandia, sank into the sea between 50 and 35 million years ago. Today, we know the tiny fraction of it that remains above the waves as New Zealand. But before most of Zealandia disappeared – about 60 million years ago – ancient penguins walked upon the 2-million-square-mile continent (5.18 million square
It was 1952, and Alan Turing was about to reshape humanity’s understanding of biology. In a landmark paper, the English mathematician introduced what became known as the Turing pattern – the notion that the dynamics of certain uniform systems could give rise to stable patterns when disturbed. Such ‘order from disturbance’ has become the
Scientists have long theorised that there are other types of superconductor out there waiting to be discovered, and it turns out they were right: new research has identified a g-wave superconductor for the first time, a major development in this area of physics. Superconductors are materials that offer no electrical resistance, so electricity can
Innovative ways to live more sustainably are urgently required – including in how we ship items across the planet. Right now, 90 percent of the world’s merchandise is transported by shipping, and although that can be better for the environment than air freight according to certain measures, cargo ships are still powered by fossil fuels,
US government scientists reported Monday that the Arctic Ocean’s floating ice cover has shrivelled to its second lowest extent since satellite records began in 1979. Until this month, only once in the last 42 years has Earth’s frozen skull cap covered less than 4 million square kilometres (1.5 million square miles). The trend line
Hundreds of elephants that died mysteriously in Botswana’s famed Okavango Delta succumbed to cyanobacteria poisoning, the wildlife department revealed on Monday. The landlocked southern African country boasts the world’s largest elephant population, estimated at around 130,000. More than 300 of the pachyderms have mysteriously died since March, with their intact tusks ruling out the
Water is a very strange thing. In our everyday experience, when liquid water drops below 0 °C (32 °F or 273.15 Kelvin), it freezes into a solid form, becoming ice. But ice, it turns out, is rather weird too. Most of the time, ice seems to be the same frozen solid, no matter where
Funnel webs are considered one of Australia’s most fearsome spiders, but their ability to kill humans is by accident rather than design, our new research shows. In findings published today, we reveal how the highly toxic and quick-acting venom of male funnel-web spiders is likely to have developed as a defence against predators. When
Two extremely rare Javan rhinoceros calves have been spotted in an Indonesian national park, boosting hopes for the future of one of the world’s most endangered mammals. The rhino calves – a female named Helen and male called Luther – were seen with their mothers in footage taken from nearly 100 camera traps installed in
According to the IUCN Red List 32,000 species are threatened with extinction – everything from birds and mammals, to reef corals and crustaceans. And that’s only the species we know about. But although we might be working hard to help some species come back from the brink, we might also be eating some threatened species without
The fall equinox comes this Tuesday at 9:30 am ET (1:30 pm UTC). Although not the best time to balance an egg (that’s an old wives’ tale), the equinox heralds the coming of autumn, cooler temperatures, and shorter days for the Northern Hemisphere, which houses about 90 percent of Earth’s population. For the Southern Hemisphere, it signifies the opposite:
Egypt’s antiquities ministry announced Sunday the discovery of 14 sarcophagi in the Saqqara necropolis south of Cairo that had lain buried for 2,500 years. The coffins were found two days ago during an archaeological dig at the burial spot where another 13 wooden sarcophagi had been discovered last week, the ministry said in a statement.
Human-made plastic isn’t just flooding the world’s oceans, it’s also piling up on the land and in the soil. For years now, the synthetic microfibres woven into our clothing have been leaching into the environment. Even when we don’t throw away our clothes or when we buy them secondhand, wastewater from our washing machines can
As a species, humans have populated almost every corner of the earth. We have developed technologies and cultures which shape the world we live in. The idea of ‘natural selection’ or ‘survival of the fittest’ seems to make sense in Stone Age times when we were fighting over scraps of meat, but does it still
Scientists in Japan have developed a paper-based sensor equipped with an array of extremely tiny microneedles, which they say can painlessly penetrate human skin for a quick and easy method of conducting diagnostic tests for conditions like pre-diabetes. Microneedles are super tiny-spikes so small they’re measured in micrometres (one thousandth of a millimetre), designed
The world’s most advanced telescopes were not made for today’s temperatures, and it’s messing with our observations of the night sky. Three decades-worth of data from the Paranal Observatory in northern Chile – home of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) – has revealed several ways in which climate change is already impacting
Magnetism and electricity are linked together in many weird and wonderful ways throughout science, including the fascinating magnetoelectric effect noticeable in some crystals – where the electrical properties of a crystal can be influenced by a magnetic field, and vice versa. Now things have gotten even weirder, because scientists have discovered a brand new
Two experiments hunting for a whisper of a particle that prevents whole galaxies from flying apart recently published some contradictory results. One came up empty handed, while the other gives us every reason to keep on searching. Dark bosons are dark matter candidates based on force-carrying particles that don’t really pack much force. Unlike
Here’s how active this year’s Atlantic hurricane season has been: When Tropical Storm Wilfred formed on September 18, the National Hurricane Center exhausted its list of storm names for only the second time since naming began in 1950. Within hours, two more storm had formed – now known as Alpha and Beta. Even more
Making educated guesses is something we all do every day – but until now scientists haven’t fully understood how these leaps in logic are processed in the brain. Now new research on mice and humans suggests neurons can effectively ‘join the dots’ between two thoughts to figure something out. If you’re looking for a
Around 120,000 years ago in what is now northern Saudi Arabia, a small band of Homo sapiens stopped to drink and forage at a shallow lake that was also frequented by camels, buffalo, and elephants bigger than any species seen today The people may have hunted the large mammals but they did not stay