Nature has a way of putting our best technology to shame. For decades now, scientists have been trying to manufacture the ultimate sound absorber – a carefully engineered material that can manage acoustic waves for stealthy movement or simple peace and quiet.   As it turns out, however, that cherished ‘metastructure’ may already exist in

First we discovered platypus would look great at a rave, now wombats, bilbies and other marsupials can join the blacklight party – with scientists unexpectedly finding they all glow wonderfully fluorescent greens, blues and pinks beneath UV light.   Over the last few years scientists have found biofluorescence is more common across mammals than we

A dwindling tribe of chimpanzees in Guinea that gained global fame for uncanny abilities to use tools has a glimmer of hope after its last fertile female gave birth. The tiny community of apes lives in a forest around the village of Bossou, in the far southeastern corner of the country.   Scientists have trekked

The discovery of a creature described as resembling a “buck-toothed toucan” that lived some 68 million years ago has upended assumptions about diversity in the birds that lived alongside dinosaurs.   At less than nine centimetres (3.5 inches) long, the delicate skull of the bird scientists have dubbed Falcatakely forsterae might be easily overlooked. In

For a long time, Hawai’i Island has been home to a mystery. Somehow, the amount of freshwater in underground aquifers has seemed much smaller than it should be, given the amount of rainfall.   Scientists have just found out why. Deep underground, running below the island’s coast, vast quantities of freshwater are transported from the flanks

The largest sharks ever to have roamed the oceans parked their young in shallow, warm-water nurseries where food was abundant and predators scarce until they could assume their title as kings and queens of the sea.   But as sea levels declined in a cooling world, the brutal mega-predator, Otodus megalodons, may have found fewer

Before we start mining for precious metals in the darkness of the deep sea, we might try switching on the light first and observing our surroundings. In this seemingly isolated abyss, at deeper than 3,000 metres (9,800 ft) below sea level, scientists were able to coax a massive swarm of 115 cutthroat eels (Ilyophis arx)

When a dead thresher shark washed up onshore, it was obvious what had killed it – a swordfish had stabbed it from behind and left a large hunk of its “sword” embedded in the beast, a new study finds.   No one saw the actual attack, so it’s unclear why the swordfish jabbed the shark.

Ants are pretty organised little creatures. Highly social insects, they know how to forage, build complicated nests, steal your pantry snacks, and generally look after the queens and the colony, all by working together.   Leaf-cutter ants turn that cooperation up several notches. Leaf-cutter ant colonies like Acromyrmex echinatior can contain millions of ants, split

The origins of life, a few billion years ago, were humble. Single-celled organisms squirming in the ooze, over millions and billions of years developing into multi-celled plants and, eventually, animals.   But when and how these evolutionary spurts occurred has been difficult to puzzle out. Organic material doesn’t necessarily preserve well, and when it does,

Every now and then, Earth reminds us it’s capable of releasing some furious energy.  Case in point: scientists have just detected a new extreme in hotspots of lightning activity called ‘superbolts’: intense lightning strikes that shine up to 1,000 times brighter than typical lightning strikes.    The observations come from researchers at the US Los

Several countries in East Africa – namely Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, and South Sudan – are still trying to contain the worst desert locust invasion the region has experienced in over 70 years.   The locusts have destroyed vegetation – especially staple cereal crops, legumes, and pastures – resulting in huge economic losses. The World Bank

Life on planet Earth is a fragile thing. All it takes is one wayward asteroid, and bam, there goes the most dominant group of land animals on our planet. If it wasn’t for the 10 kilometre-wide meteorite that hurtled into Earth some 66 million years ago, dinosaurs might have continued to dominate the land, a

How did life arise on Earth? How did it survive the Hadean eon, a time when repeated massive impacts excavated craters thousands of kilometres in diameter into the Earth’s surface? Those impacts turned the Earth into a hellish place, where the oceans turned to steam, and the atmosphere was filled with rock vapour. How could any living

If you’ve ever studied any chemistry or biology, there’s a very good chance you’ve come across the common pictorial representation of what a chromosome is supposed to look like.   As millions of high-schoolers and undergraduates will attest, it’s a tall, narrow X-shape – visualising what two joined chromatids look like after DNA replication takes place, but

Volcanoes rank among the most destructive and awe-inspiring phenomena on the planet. But these fiery fissures do much more than just destroy. They also create. In a new study, researchers in Russia report the discovery of one such creation – an unusual mineral never before documented by scientists: an alluring, vibrantly blue-and-green crystallised substance the

Orcas are suspected to be behind the disappearance of great white sharks off Cape Town’s coast over the last few years, according to a report published by South Africa’s government on Tuesday.   The vanishing of great whites from the coastal sites False Bay and Gansbaai had previously been blamed on illegal hunting and overfishing,

One fascinating quirk of the Universe is that shapes and patterns can be found in hugely different contexts: the Golden Spiral can be seen in the human cochlea and the shape of a spiral galaxy; the fractal geometry of veins echoed in the branching of lightning.   In a bold new pilot study, an astrophysicist

Scientists have identified an old piece of the Pacific Ocean – the ancient remains of its long-ago seabed – extending hundreds of miles underneath China, as it is pulled downward into Earth’s mantle transition zone.   This rocky slab that used to line the bottom of the Pacific is a relic of the oceanic lithosphere,

The Triassic-Jurassic extinction event that ended the Triassic period and brought in the Jurassic around 200 million years ago was one of the biggest mass extinctions in the history of our planet.   In total, around 25-34 percent of marine genera are thought to have been lost during the event, and many land groups wiped out,

Climate change is testing the resilience of our planet’s birds. While tropical avian species appear especially vulnerable to habitat loss, drought, natural disasters, and declining prey, new research suggests they can withstand heat waves quite well.   Using the largest dataset of its kind, the research calls into question a commonly-held conclusion that tropical birds,

The ocean floor of the South Pacific contains traces of ancient dust that may have changed Earth’s very climate, and new research suggests it came all the way from beneath ice-age glaciers of what is now Argentina.    Whipped up by strong westerly winds some 20,000 years ago, these microscopic minerals would have circumnavigated nearly

They’ve been watching us for decades. Monitoring our movements. Studying our behaviour. Tracking our routines. Stealing our chips.  In the seaside city of Bristol gulls are the ultimate human stalkers, and the timing of their peck is impeccable.   Scientists tracking these birds have discovered gulls are so well adapted to human urban environments, they

After months of searching, in October scientists located and destroyed the first nest of giant ‘murder hornets’ ever discovered in the US, eradicating a hidden enclave of the invasive insects concealed in a tree in Washington State, close to the Canadian border.   While the discovery and elimination of the nest is considered a victory

The remains of a giant, ancient lake have been discovered under Greenland, buried deep below the ice sheet in the northwest of the country and estimated to be hundreds of thousands of years old, if not millions, scientists say.   The huge ‘fossil lake bed’ is a phenomenon the likes of which scientists haven’t seen

The bigfin squid (Magnapinna) is one of the most elusive creatures that we know. It dwells in the permanently dark depths of the ocean and is an extremely rare sight, with only around a dozen confirmed spottings worldwide.   Now, for the first time, bigfin squids have been seen off the coast of Australia not

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 and presto! You’ve grown some new furry friends.   But the microbial species you can cultivate in a petri dish are only a tiny fraction

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 rediscovered the great fox-spider (Alopecosa fabrilis) on an undeveloped portion of a military installation in Surrey, England, after a two-year search. The last time the

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 subsists on eucalyptus leaves much like its marsupial mate, the koala. But unlike the distinctly tree-bound koala, the greater glider can take to the air,

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 are also capable of surviving and reproducing, as are their offspring and so on down the line of descent.   Species optimise their Darwinian fitness

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, researchers have found.​   As part of an experiment to see how technology could improve the well-being of captive animals, researchers installed a tunnel fitted

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 that have been hiding in plain sight for hundreds of years.   The gentoo penguin (Pygoscelis papua) was first discovered in the cold Southern Ocean

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 donate extra shells for them to live in.   The population of the crustaceans – which protect themselves by wearing and living inside the discarded shells

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 remains of a plant eater common to one of the two major land masses have been unexpectedly unearthed in rocks belonging to the other,

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 around 165 million years ago, and probably even earlier. They lived through the age of dinosaurs (and saw out their extinction), then lived through the

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 to new research.   Shifts in the seabed caused channels to form, through which the magma could flow freely, researchers say. This resulted in an

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 navy and the coastguard along with local volunteers pushed back at least 120 whales by dawn Tuesday after a gruelling overnight rescue, navy spokesman Indika

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 synthetic materials that glow in the dark more effectively than anything in nature.   Geologists first described the mineral in the 1800s, who were intrigued

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 didn’t seem to be linked to digestion, because ants do this even after they have only ingested water,” said zoologist Simon Tragust from the Martin

For the second time in just three months the Indian Forest Service has announced the discovery of a golden flapshell turtle. Like a slice of cheese, a slab of butter, or the yolk of an egg, this zesty creature with its vivid yellow shell, head, and limbs looks good enough to eat – and has

How long have mammals been social creatures? At least since the Late Cretaceous part of the dinosaur age, according to a new study, which puts back the earliest evidence of the behaviour by some 10 million years.   Studying fossils of the small rodent Filikomys primaevus (meaning “youthful, friendly mouse”) dated to around 75.5 million

Rescuers and volunteers were racing Monday to save about 100 pilot whales stranded on Sri Lanka’s western coast in the island nation’s biggest-ever mass beaching. The short-finned pilot whales began beaching at Panadura, 25 kilometres (15 miles) south of Colombo, shortly before dusk and within an hour their numbers swelled to around 100, local police

With an estimated 300 active volcanoes on Earth, the challenge is how to monitor them all to send out early warnings before they erupt. Measuring volcanic gas emissions is also no easy task.   Now researchers have designed specially-adapted drones to help gather data from an active volcano in Papua New Guinea (PNG). The drones

Before dawn, with just enough light to see by, James Dorey and his colleagues went searching for bees. This might sound like a futile exercise, since most bees are sleeping rather than finding food when it’s dark out; low light dulls the colour of flowers, and night-time produces cooler temperatures.   But at least a

The successful eradication of the first nest of Asian giant hornets ever discovered in the US made headlines last week, and now scientists have shared new details on the technology and techniques they’re using to counter the encroaching menace of this invasive pest.   The Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia), often nicknamed the ‘murder’ hornet,

Scientists are seeing the Australian platypus in a whole new light. Under an ultraviolet lamp, this bizarre-looking creature appears even more peculiar than normal, glowing a soft, greenish-blue hue instead of the typical brown we’re used to seeing.   The recent discovery has not been found in any other monotreme species – a primitive type

It’s that time of the year when skeletons, skulls, and bones have found their way onto cookies, porches, and storefront windows. While skeletons are universally considered symbols of death, the process of turning a newly dead animal into a bony skeleton relies on an explosion of life that ushers in the process of decomposition. Much

Scientists have examined the relationship between forest fungi and mature trees in greater detail than ever before. Turns out the more fungal colonies they’re connected to, the better the trees grow – an important discovery for forest management and climate change response.   Previous research has shown how fungal organisms can support trees at the