Science
495 articles
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Why A Century Of Animal Discoveries Is Breaking Every Old Biodiversity Rule
We have spent the past hundred years building maps of life on Earth, assuming our core conservation zones were locked in place. That assumption is dead wrong. When researchers looked at how a
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Why 55 Million Year Old Penguin Fossils Rewrite Antarctic History
Fifty-five million years ago, Antarctica didn't wear a coat of ice. It was green, humid, and remarkably warm. You wouldn't find emperor penguins huddled on frozen wastes back then because the
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What Sophie Adenot Learned Out There Between Earth And The Void
We romanticize spaceflight until something mechanical fights back against a gloved hand. European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot recently made history as the first French woman to conduct a
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How An Eleven Year Old Found A Forty Eight Million Year Old Turtle In Wyoming
Most family rock-hounding trips end with a pocketful of quartz and maybe a mundane chunk of jasper. For eleven-year-old Touren Pope, a routine excursion across the dust and badlands of southwest
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Why Your Dna Proves Human Evolution Is Not A Family Tree
You share your body with the ghosts of extinct species. Most people think human evolution looks like a neat, branching tree where Homo sapiens marched triumphantly to the top while everyone else died
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Why Eurasian Scops Owls Keep Bringing Live Snakes Into Their Nests
Picture a cozy bird nest filled with fluffy, vulnerable owl chicks. Now, imagine a live snake slithering right through the bedding. It sounds like a scene from a nightmare, but recent field research
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What Happens When You Dump 12,000 Tonnes Of Orange Peels On Dead Soil
You take 1,000 truckloads of sticky, unwanted fruit waste and dump it on a dead, sun-baked patch of dirt. Most people would expect a massive pest problem, a terrible smell, or a fine from
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What The Iss Cricket Experiment Taught Us About Life In Space
Gravity shapes life on Earth. Every creature alive today evolved under a constant pull. Remove that pull, and biology changes in unexpected ways. Back in 2005, researchers tested this exact principle
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What Living On An Arctic Icebreaker Taught Us About Ocean Life
You don't fully understand isolation until you are trapped on a steel vessel surrounded by millions of square kilometers of moving ice. When you spend weeks watching massive sheets fracture beneath a
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Why The August Lunar Eclipse Is Worth Staying Up Late For
You don't need expensive gear or a plane ticket to catch a cosmic show. If you're anywhere across the Americas, the upcoming partial lunar eclipse on August 27–28 puts you right in the front row.
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Why Those 38 Million Year Old Snakes Change What We Know About Fossils
Most fossil hunting ends in disappointment. You spend weeks under a baking sun, crawling through dirt, only to find a few broken, unidentifiable bone fragments. That's usually the reality for
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Why Doing Nothing Is Often The Best Way To Grow A Forest
We often think nature needs us to fix it. We assume that if we want a forest, we need to buy saplings, dig holes, set up plastic tubes, and water the ground religiously. It turns out, we're usually
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Why Joel Sartore And The Photo Ark Are Changing How We See Extinction
We live in an era where the word extinction feels abstract. It's a statistic on a screen or a sad story about a creature you'll never see. But Joel Sartore changed that by doing something deceptively
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How Cats Decimated Ascension Island And Why Fixing It Was So Messy
In 1815, a garrison of British marines brought domestic cats to Ascension Island in the South Atlantic to control rat populations. It was a routine military decision with ecological consequences that
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What Most People Get Wrong About The Ancient Monster Lake Hiding Beneath The Sahara
Look at a map of North Africa today, and you see an endless expanse of punishing heat and wind-scoured dunes. It is hard to imagine a place less hospitable to aquatic life. Yet, beneath those very
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Why Ancient Wyoming Forests Took 100000 Years To Recover From Extreme Global Warming
Fifty-six million years ago, Earth experienced a massive fever. Massive amounts of carbon flooded the atmosphere, pushing global temperatures up by as much as 8 degrees Celsius. While modern climate
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Why The Return Of California's Lost Sunflower Sea Stars Changes Everything
For ten years, divers along the West Coast searched in vain for a creature many feared was gone forever. Known scientifically as Pycnopodia helianthoides, the sunflower sea star earned a mythical
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Why The 2026 European Total Solar Eclipse Was Unlike Anything You Have Seen
Skies across mainland Europe went completely dark during the afternoon of August 12, 2026, marking the continent's first total solar eclipse since 1999. Millions of people jammed into cloudless
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Why Tonight Is The Best Night In Decades To Catch The Perseid Meteor Shower
You don't need a telescope, an expensive camera, or a degree in astrophysics to enjoy the Perseid meteor shower tonight. You just need to step outside, turn off your porch lights, and look up. Right
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What Animals Actually Do When Day Turns Into Night During An Eclipse
When the moon slides directly in front of the sun, plunging the landscape into an eerie, premature twilight, human beings pull on protective glasses and gasp. But what goes through the minds of
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Why Lake Erie Fish Refuse To Flee Low Oxygen Zones
Look at Lake Erie from a boat on a calm July afternoon, and you'll see a vast, flat sheet of blue water stretching to the horizon. It looks uniform. It looks simple. Underneath that surface, the
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Why China's First Freshwater Cave Snail Is Teetering On The Brink Of Extinction
You can spend a lifetime exploring underground ecosystems and still miss creatures hiding in plain sight. Scientists recently discovered China’s first known freshwater cave snail, but there is a
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What Most People Get Wrong About The 6000 Kilometer Ant Super Colony Stretching Across Europe
Imagine a single, uninterrupted animal society stretching 6,000 kilometres from the sun-baked coast of Portugal all the way to northern Italy. Billions of individual workers scurry across millions of
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Why Wildlife Managers Are Oiling Raven Eggs To Save Sage Grouse
Ground zero for a quiet western American conservation crisis sits right in the open sagebrush. Here, wildlife biologists are painting raven eggs with mineral oil. It sounds bizarre. It is actually a
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Why You Desperately Need Special Glasses For The 2026 Solar Eclipse
You are going to blind yourself if you rely on regular sunglasses for the upcoming solar eclipse. People love to underestimate the power of the sun because a chunk of it is temporarily hidden behind
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Why Lithops Werneri Is On The Brink Of Extinction
Walk across a sun-scorched patch of the Erongo Mountains in Namibia, and you will step right over one of the rarest plants on Earth without ever knowing it. Lithops werneri doesn't look like a
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Why Saving The Queen Of Sheba Orchid Changes Everything We Know About Plant Conservation
You can count the remaining wild Queen of Sheba orchids on your fingers and toes, and you'd still have digits left over. Fewer than 30 individual plants survive in the wild across Western Australia.
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Why This Long-lost California Plant Changes Everything We Know About Local Ecosystems
Botanists spent nearly seven decades assuming a tiny yellow wildflower had vanished from the earth forever. They were wrong. In the rugged hills of eastern Contra Costa County, professional plant
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Why Plants Feel Full And How It Changes Crop Farming Forever
Plants don't have stomachs. Yet, they possess a surprisingly sophisticated way of knowing when they have eaten enough. Researchers at New York University recently uncovered a molecular switch inside
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Why The August 2026 Total Solar Eclipse Map Changes Everything You Think You Know About Chasing Totality
You're looking at the wrong maps if you think catching the next great celestial show is just a matter of booking a quick flight and standing outside. On August 12, 2026, a total solar eclipse cuts
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Why North American Birds Break The Biological Rule Of Lifespan
Biology loves a tidy rule. For decades, standard evolutionary theory whispered a neat little secret across textbooks: females live longer. When you look at mammals, from laboratory mice to human
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Why China Using Bamboo To Fight Desertification Changes The Environmental Game
Everyone loves a quick fix, but nature doesn't work that way. Or does it? When researchers in northern China started planting bamboo to halt expanding deserts, traditional ecologists raised eyebrows.
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Why Saturns Moon Titan Is Basically Earth On Steroids
You look at pictures of space and expect dead rock. Gray craters. Cold vacuum. Total silence. Then you point a telescope at Titan and everything flips upside down. Saturn’s largest moon has an
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Why The Milky Way's Violent Past Changes How We See The Night Sky
You look up at a quiet band of stars stretching across the dark night sky, but that peaceful view is a total lie. The Milky Way was built through absolute chaos, massive collisions, and a brutal
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How To Spot The July Double Meteor Shower Despite A Blinding Full Moon
Two distinct meteor showers peak on the exact same night, and most people will miss every single streak because they don't know how to handle the moonlight. On the night of July 30 into the early
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Why Changing Honeybee Diets Might Save Them From Pesticides
You've probably heard that bees are dying off. We talk endlessly about habitat loss and chemical sprays, but we rarely look at what's actually on their plates. A recent study out of Penn State flips
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Why Lake Vostok Survives Under Four Kilometers Of Antarctic Ice
Imagine standing on a frozen wasteland where the air temperature sits at an unforgiving minus 55 degrees Celsius. Now, look straight down. Four kilometers beneath your boots lies a massive, liquid
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What Most People Get Wrong About Non-native Trees In Regrowing Tropical Forests
When a patch of tropical forest is cleared and later abandoned, nature tries to heal itself. You might picture a clean slate where local trees quietly take over the soil. But reality is messier. A
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What Ancient Kenyan Footprints Reveal About Our Forgotten Human Relatives
Bones lie. Footprints record actual moments. Along the muddy shores of Kenya's Lake Turkana, 1.43-million-year-old impressions left by an extinct human relative are rewriting what we know about our
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Why Mangrove Forests Are Our Best Defense Against Climate Change
If you look at a global map of climate solutions, you usually see solar panels, wind turbines, and massive electric car factories. You rarely see muddy water, tangled roots, and swarms of crabs. That
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Why Sophie Adenot Doing Yoga In Space Actually Looks Different
Gravity keeps us honest on Earth. Without it, even a simple stretch turns into an entirely different physics problem. European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot recently proved this by sharing a
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Why Hummingbird Hawkmoths Have Their Own Version Of Handedness
You probably don't think twice about grabbing a coffee cup with your dominant hand. We assume handedness is a trait reserved for humans, apes, or maybe our household pets. But nature loves surprising
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Why African Treefrogs Mating With Multiple Males Is Actually Home Improvement
Biology textbooks spent decades telling a neat, orderly story about animal reproduction. Females choose the best male, a single partnership forms, and offspring inherit genes from that exclusive
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Why Plant-eating Insects Are Not The Pests You Think They Are
We usually look at plant-eating insects all wrong. Most people assume bugs chewing through leaves are simple destroyers causing damage to natural habitats. Turns out, nature operates with far more
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How A Tapeworm Parasite Makes Worker Ants Live Three Times Longer
A tiny parasite inside an ant's gut can stretch its lifespan from a few months to over three years. That sounds like a sci-fi plot twist, but it's real biology. When the tapeworm Anomotaenia brevis
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How Researchers Used Toy Sprinklers To Untangle Feynman's Longest Physics Puzzle
Imagine submerging an ordinary lawn sprinkler in a tank of water and forcing fluid into its nozzles instead of blasting it out. Which way does it spin? Does it rotate backward, forward, or sit
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Why The Kamchatka Earthquake Tsunami Changed What We Know About Ocean Waves
When a massive magnitude 8.8 earthquake ripped through the Kuril-Kamchatka subduction zone on July 29, 2025, it didn't just rattle eastern Russia. It sent a shockwave across the entire Pacific basin.
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Why You Naturally Turn Left and How It Changes Everything About Public Spaces
Drop a human being into an empty room, a crowded museum, or a grocery store. Watch them from above. Within minutes, a strange pattern emerges. They don't walk in straight lines. They don't wander
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Why Biology Forgot Tibor Ganti and the Simplest Machine That Explains Life
Ask a biologist to define life, and you'll likely get a messy list of traits. Cells, reproduction, DNA, metabolism, evolution. It's a description, not a definition. In 1971, a Hungarian industrial
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Your blood is actually 700 million years old and we finally know why
Humans like to think we're the peak of modern engineering. We've got smartphones, rockets, and advanced medicine. But the most sophisticated technology you own isn't in your pocket. It’s the red