News
Every morning you walk under the streetlights on your way to work but you probably don't know they're forming 'death spirals' that trap insects and scientists have only just discovered why
3+ hour, 19+ min ago (658+ words) On a summer night in the Golan Heights, an amateur naturalist came across something that had no name and no precedent: thousands of tiny pill bugs moving in near-perfect unison, circling beneath a pool of artificial light in a vast,…...
Gas leaf blowers were built to clear a yard in 20 minutes, and a study of 160 bird species just found the machines are drowning out the mating calls birds need to breed
5+ hour, 41+ min ago (734+ words) A male songbird starts calling before sunrise, from the same branch, in the same yard. He is not decorating the morning, he is advertising, and a female somewhere in the next block is listening. He has maybe six weeks to…...
A cousin of the crow on your fence can count out loud to 4, and 3 more hidden skills all trace back to a brain the size of a walnut that reasons like an ape
6+ hour, 24+ min ago (721+ words) Most mornings, it lands on the fence before you finish your coffee. It watches the dog, it watches the kids, it watches you. You have probably never given it a second thought. But scientists have been doing almost nothing else,…...
A 5 pound fox slipped into two California solar farms after losing almost 95 percent of its wild home, and the fence built to guard the panels ended up locking out the coyotes that hunt it
6+ hour, 24+ min ago (718+ words) In the dry heart of California's Central Valley lives a fox so small it could sit in a shoebox. The San Joaquin kit fox once ranged across the whole valley floor, and today it has'almost nowhere left'to go. So when…...
A mysterious creature has roamed Earth's rivers for 100 million years and scientists just heard it make a sound for the very first time
1+ day, 4+ hour ago (549+ words) Underwater recording devices, anchored to cement blocks on the Hudson River floor, spent weeks collecting audio from the murky depths during spring and summer 2021. Researchers expected silence. Atlantic sturgeon " armored, prehistoric, unchanged for 100 million years " had never been known to…...
A single great whale locks away 33 tonnes of carbon over a 60 year life and feeds the ocean's tiniest plants that make half the air we breathe, and when economists finally priced all of it, one living whale came out at 2 million dollars
3+ day, 21+ hour ago (767+ words) Something out in the deep ocean has been doing a job that no factory, no machine and no government program has ever matched. It has been doing it for millions of years, completely free of charge, and economics has been…...
Wind turbines were accused of being "guillotines" for birds. Then one black blade proved the story was very different
4+ day, 19+ min ago (612+ words) Wind turbines are a vital cog in the green energy machine. But they have a flip side. The blades kill thousands of birds all over the world every year. Critics call them giant guillotines in the sky. The problem seemed…...
Once nearly gone from Texas, zoo-hatched horned lizards released into the wild may now be breeding on their own
4+ day, 2+ hour ago (510+ words) Once thought to be vanishing in parts of Texas, this small reptile is now returning to some areas of the state. In recent years, sightings had decreased dramatically throughout its natural range. While conservation work continued behind the scenes, it…...
Octopuses evolved a brain nothing like ours, yet their arms think independently, their sleep may carry dreams, and their intelligence rewrites everything we thought we knew about minds
4+ day, 4+ hour ago (317+ words) An octopus brain is doughnut-shaped, wrapped around the esophagus. More than half of its neurons sit not in that central structure but in the eight nerve cords running through its arms. Each arm functions, in effect, as a distributed mini-brain…...
Burmese pythons have wiped out 98 percent of Florida's opossums, so scientists are now strapping GPS collars onto the survivors and letting the snakes eat them, because the signal from inside the python leads hunters straight to it
4+ day, 4+ hour ago (859+ words) Deep in the sawgrass marshes of South Florida, where the light goes green and the water has no bottom you can see, something moves that most people never will. It is not the panther or the alligator that has wildlife…...