A Space Daily column

Life Signs

Nature and earth science

Life Signs is where Space Daily looks down instead of up. Animals, ecosystems, and Earth science, with a bias for peer-reviewed studies over press-release hype. The living world turns out to be at least as strange as anything in orbit.

Earth Observation

On 29 April 2020, a single bolt of lightning stretched 768 kilometres across Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi in one continuous flash, far enough to reach from New York City to Columbus, Ohio before the thunder from its first end had finished rolling

On 29 April 2020, a single cloud-to-cloud lightning bolt stretched 768 kilometres across Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi in 7.39 seconds — a flash longer than the drive from Boston to Cleveland, certified by the WMO as the longest ever measured at the time.

Jun 29, 2026

Earth Observation

Satellites can now tell a palm oil plantation from native rainforest by the precise angle its fronds bend the sunlight, reading the near-perfect planted lattice against the chaos of wild canopy — and the European Union’s 2023 deforestation regulation now leans on their ability to do exactly that

{"content":"From 700 kilometres up, an oil palm plantation looks almost nothing like the rainforest it replaced — and the difference is not just colour or texture, but the precise angle at which su

Jun 29, 2026

Earth Observation

In the early 1960s, mother bald eagles across the United States were crushing their own eggs by sitting on them, in a continent-wide reproductive collapse caused by a single agricultural pesticide, and by 1963 only 417 nesting pairs of America’s national symbol remained alive in the lower 48 states

The bald eagle had not always been a rare bird. When the United States adopted Haliaeetus leucocephalus as its national symbol on 20 June 1782, the species may…

Jun 28, 2026

Earth News

When an iceberg roughly the size of Chicago broke away from Antarctica’s George VI Ice Shelf in January 2025, researchers diverted their ship to the newly exposed seafloor — and found a hidden world of sponges, anemones, sea spiders and octopuses that may have been thriving in darkness for hundreds of years.

On 13 January 2025, an iceberg named A-84 broke away from Antarctica's George VI Ice Shelf, opening a section of seafloor that had been sealed beneath floating ice.

Jun 26, 2026

Science

In 1987, Costa Rica’s forest cover had collapsed to roughly 21% of the country, and the mechanism that quietly reversed it over the next three decades was not a treaty but a small line item in the national tax on gasoline, paying private landowners to let the trees grow back

By 1987, Costa Rica's forest cover had collapsed to roughly 21%. A 1996 law funded by a tax on gasoline began paying landowners to protect and regrow forest — and within a generation, tree cover nearly tripled.

Jun 25, 2026

Science

Scientists have directly observed less than 0.001 percent of the deep ocean floor — an area comparable to the state of Rhode Island — despite decades of exploration, according to a global dataset of 44,000 deep-sea dives compiled by the Ocean Discovery League

The Ocean Discovery League compiled records of approximately 44,000 deep-sea dives for a study published in Science Advances conducted between 1958 and the early 2020s.

Jun 24, 2026

Science

The spider hides by pretending to be the fungus that kills its neighbors, and it took scientists this long to notice because science had no category for an animal that imitates a disease

There is a difference between looking like something dangerous and looking like something diseased.

Jun 23, 2026

Earth News

A blind, pale salamander in the caves of Slovenia can survive a decade without eating, may live past 100, and was once recorded staying in the exact same spot for seven years — locals call it the “human fish,” and it barely moves because in total darkness there is nowhere worth going

Somewhere deep beneath the limestone hills of Slovenia, in caves that no sunlight has ever touched, lives an animal that has, in nearly every way, given up on the version of being alive that the rest of us would recognise.

Jun 23, 2026

Science

In the Amazon canopy a newly named spider called Taczanowskia waska was found mimicking not another animal but a parasitic fungus, copying both how the fungus looks and how it behaves

Mimicry in the animal kingdom follows a fairly predictable grammar. An organism resembles something dangerous, something inedible, or something it wants to eat.

Jun 23, 2026

Water World

Two species of sharks, including hammerheads, live inside the active crater of an underwater volcano in the Solomon Islands that has erupted at least 39 times since 1939, in conditions of extreme acidity, elevated temperature, and frequent violent disturbance that the standard models of marine biology say should make the crater uninhabitable for large animals

Approximately 24 kilometres south of Vangunu Island in the western Solomon Islands, in a part of the Pacific Ocean that lies just north of an active tectonic subduction zone, there is a submarine volcano called Kavachi.

Jun 23, 2026

Earth News

For as much as 14,000 years, the aspen clone called Pando has spread across 106 Utah acres as roughly 47,000 trunks, 13 million pounds of wood and roots, and one male organism still trying to replace itself through shoots the deer keep eating

Pando, a single quaking aspen in Utah, covers 106 acres, weighs about 6,000 tons, and has been cloning itself from one seed for an estimated 14,000 years — possibly far longer.

Jun 22, 2026

Earth News

In 1946, a captured Nazi V-2 rocket launched from White Sands carried a 35mm motion picture camera to an altitude of 105 kilometres, and the grainy black-and-white frames it brought back became the first photographs of Earth taken from space — years before the camera’s own engineers had a name for the boundary it had crossed.

{"content":"On October 24, 1946, a 35mm DeVry motion picture camera bolted into the nose of a captured German V-2 rocket clicked through a single frame every second-and-a-half as the missile arced

Jun 22, 2026

Climate Science

The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, the largest documented volcanic eruption in human history, killed approximately 90,000 people directly and produced the year without a summer in 1816, a climate disruption that caused famine across the Northern Hemisphere, may have triggered the first global cholera pandemic, and produced the cold dark summer at Lake Geneva during which Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein

On the evening of 5 April 1815, the residents of Java and surrounding Indonesian islands heard what they believed were cannon shots in the distance.

Jun 21, 2026

Whales Ahoy

When a dead whale sinks to the seafloor, its ‘whale fall’ becomes an oasis feeding deep-sea life for decades — up to 190 species crowding a single skeleton, with bone-eating worms gnawing the bones for as long as a decade

One whale skeleton on the deep seafloor can host an entire neighbourhood of animals.

Jun 20, 2026

Science

Scientists say the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could collapse with very little additional warming and the four metres of sea level rise that would follow cannot be stopped once it begins

A modelling study published in Communications Earth & Environment in June 2025 found that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could begin an irreversible collapse…

Jun 20, 2026

Earth Observation

Point Nemo sits so far from any coastline that the closest humans to it are often the astronauts aboard the International Space Station passing overhead, not anyone standing on land.

Point Nemo, the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, lies more than 2,688 km from the nearest (uninhabited) land. When the ISS passes overhead at about 400 km, its crew is often the closest humans. The same emptiness makes it the chosen graveyard for deorbited spacecraft.

Jun 20, 2026