Earth & Life
Crocodiles and alligators use sticks as bait to hunt nesting birds
Crocodiles may be smarter than we thought—or we may be reading too much into their stick-gathering habits near nesting birds.
Earth & Life
Japanese crows have learned to use traffic lights to crack open walnuts
These Japanese crows have turned traffic lights into a reliable tool—and researchers spent two decades watching them perfect the strategy.
Universe
Rocket Lab and MIT plan $10 million Venus probe for five-minute life search
The five-minute Venus Life Finder probe has an instrument and heat shield, but no confirmed launch date. Its fluorescence test could find organics, not prove life.
Earth & Life
Wild Asian elephants in India have been seen using branches to swat flies, while…
Elephants don't just use branches to swat flies—they reshape them first, suggesting a level of problem-solving that blurs the line between instinct and innovation.
Earth & Life
Dolphin mother teaches her calf to hunt with a shell as tool
The moment a dolphin mother taught her calf to hunt with a shell suggests animals may pass down survival skills far more deliberately than science has recognized.
Space & Missions
Curiosity finds organic molecule linked to DNA chemistry on Mars
Curiosity's first possible nitrogen heterocycle is chemically relevant to pathways toward RNA and DNA, but the instrument's imperfect match and reactive reagent keep the result well short of evidence for life.
Earth & Life
Sheep remember individual flock members for years after separation
The ovine brain treats each flock member as a distinct individual, preserving those memories in specialized neural circuits that outlast years of separation.
Earth & Life
Sealed habitat meant to sustain eight people instead became a haven for cockroaches
When scientists sealed eight people inside a artificial Earth, they discovered that the creatures they didn't want thrived while the ones they needed to survive mysteriously vanished.
Earth & Life
Lawn mower smell is actually grass sending an emergency signal
What you experience as nature's most comforting aroma is actually a distress signal—plants screaming for help in the language of chemistry.
Universe
Scientists find fresh evidence of phosphine in Venus's atmosphere
New JCMT-Venus observations have recovered the candidate phosphine signal with far more data, but overlapping teams, instrumental systematics and unknown chemistry keep the result contested.
Earth & Life
Ravens outplan our closest relatives despite walnut-sized brains
A raven's brain is walnut-sized, yet these birds outthink our closest relatives at planning for future rewards.
Science & Engineering
Sagan proposed Jupiter's sky could harbor a complete aerial ecosystem of floating life
Sagan and Salpeter's 1976 Jovian ecology was a calculation, not a claim of discovery: could airborne organisms grow, reproduce and control buoyancy before fatal descent?
Human Behaviour
Purple sweet potatoes fed Okinawa's extraordinary cluster of centenarians
A 1949 survey found that sweet potatoes of several varieties supplied about 69% of calories in Okinawa. Later longevity research is observational and points to multiple dietary, social and cohort factors.
Science & Engineering
Feral horses inherit survival from their herd's microbes, not just genes
A wild horse's survival may depend less on its genes than on the microbes it inherits from its herd.
Science & Engineering
Sea otters pack one million hairs per square inch, the densest fur of any mammal on Earth
Sea otters carry up to one million hairs per square inch — the densest fur of any mammal on Earth — because they have no blubber and would die in North Pacific water without a coat that traps a permanent layer of air against their skin.
Earth & Life
Coldest spot on Earth is so frigid a breath would freeze your lungs
The coldest temperature ever measured on Earth — minus 98 degrees Celsius, detected by satellite over the East Antarctic Plateau — is so far below biological tolerance that a single unprotected breath would freeze moisture inside the human lung.