Your Daily Science News Source from Around the Globe
This year’s hurricane season has seen a record 29 named tropical storms wreak havoc across the southeastern United States, the Caribbean and Central America, experts said on Tuesday. The cyclonic…
The discovery of a 2-million-year-old skull in a South African cave is changing what we think we know about one of humanity’s primitive ancestors, scientists report in a new study.…
Growing microbes in a petri dish is pretty simple – swab basically anything, wipe it on an agar plate, let it sit for a few days in a warm room…
A 2-inch-long (5 centimeters) spider thought to be extinct in Great Britain is actually alive and thriving on a British military base. A program manager at the Surrey Wildlife Trust…
Scientists in Australia have made a remarkable discovery, with DNA evidence revealing that one of the country’s adorable airborne marsupials is in fact three separate species. The furry-bodied greater glider…
Several close relatives of our species, Homo sapiens, have walked this Earth since the genus Homo evolved more than 2 million years ago. These hominins lived in diverse habitats and…
Neanderthals may have lost out to Homo sapiens in the evolutionary battle for survival, but as time goes on we’re learning about more and more similarities between the species –…
Fitness, the way the naturalist Charles Darwin conceptualised it, refers to the ability of organisms to survive and reproduce successfully. Reproductive success lies in species’ ability to have offspring that…
They may be naturally suited to swinging in rainforests, but monkeys in a Finnish zoo have demonstrated a “significant” preference for traffic sounds instead of the noises of the jungle,…
Birds are one of the most well studied groups of animals in the world, and yet, we’re still finding new species, some of which we’ve never seen before and others…
Shellfish such as scallops, mussels, and oysters – bivalve molluscs – readily take up tiny specs of metals into their tissues and shells. In sufficient concentrations, this can harm their…
Quantum physics promises huge advances not just in quantum computing but also in a quantum internet – a next-generation framework for transferring data from one place to another. Scientists have…
Most of us know about the vast stores of carbon in our atmosphere, and yet beneath our feet, Earth’s soil contains nearly three times as much CO2, absorbing roughly a…
Between the two halves of our brains is a gap filled with fluid and spanned only by the corpus callosum: a bridge of neural fibres that ferries information to either…
Hermit crab numbers in southern Thailand have boomed as foreign tourists have stayed away – so much so that the national park authority appealed on Friday for the public to…
The final chapter of dinosaur history is a tale stretching across two very different worlds, each a vast supercontinent dominated by its own unique mix of predators and herbivores. Fossilised…
Albanerpetontids, or “albies” for short, are the cute little salamander-like amphibians you’ve likely never heard of. Now extinct, albies had a dream run. They’d been around since the Middle Jurassic…
The world’s biggest iceberg is on a collision course with a remote South Atlantic island that is home to thousands of penguins and seals, and could impede their ability to…
For most of us mere mortals, tackling even a typical marathon would be a major achievement. So what kind of mindset are ultra-runners tapping into when they complete gruelling races…
A subterranean ‘conveyor belt’ of magma, pushing up to Earth’s surface for millions of years, was responsible for the longest stretch of erupting supervolcanoes ever seen on the planet, according…
Between COVID-19 lockdowns and nail-biting elections, 2020 is certainly driving many of us to spend more time on social media than ever before. We all know this habit isn’t necessarily…
Sri Lanka’s navy and volunteers rescued 120 pilot whales stranded in the country’s biggest mass beaching, but at least two injured animals were found dead, officials said. Sailors from the…
Nearly five years ago, world leaders gathered in Paris and agreed to collectively cut greenhouse-gas emissions. The US ratified that landmark climate accord in 2016, alongside almost every other nation.…
Silently moving in the wilderness of the Andes mountains, ancient hunter-gatherers stalked a herd of vicuña. The hunters threw stone projectile points with ease, hitting some of the beasts and…
The afterglow of the mineral hackmanite (or tenebrescent sodalite) is a fascinating natural phenomenon that has long been a mystery to scientists – even if we’re now able to engineer…
Recently, a team of researchers noticed something odd about ants. Every time the insects swallowed food or water they would start cleaning the glands on their butt ends. “The behaviour…