Nature

The ocean is vast, and deep, and dark, and inhospitable to us feeble land-dwelling creatures. There’s much that remains unknown or poorly understood in its roiling, seething belly. Technology is changing that. For over a century, mariners have reported an eerily beautiful phenomenon they called the “milky sea” – enormous patches of glowing water that

Paleontologists have uncovered an enormous fossil graveyard of squiggly, alien-like Jurassic sea creatures beneath a limestone quarry in the UK’s Cotswolds region. The fossil find includes perhaps tens of thousands of marine invertebrates called echinoderms – meaning “hedgehog skin” in Greek, and including the ancient ancestors of modern starfish, sea cucumbers, sea urchins and frilly-limbed sea

Iceland may be the last exposed remnant of a nearly Texas-size continent – called Icelandia – that sank beneath the North Atlantic Ocean about 10 million years ago, according to a new theory proposed by an international team of geophysicists and geologists. The theory goes against long-standing ideas about the formation of Iceland and the

Within the remains of 890-million-year-old microbial reefs – a world that was dominated by bacteria and algae – lie possible signs of multicellular animal life, 90 million years before there was thought to be enough oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere to sustain such life. We all personally know oxygen is vital to us as animals –

The jawbone of a bat that lived 100,000 years ago has been confirmed as belonging to an extinct species of giant vampire bat. The discovery of the jawbone of the species Desmodus draculae, found in a cave in Argentina, is helping fill in the huge gaps in the history of these amazing animals, and could

Charles Darwin famously discussed the “imperfections” of the geological record in his book On The Origin of Species. He correctly pointed out that unless conditions are just right, it’s unlikely for organisms to be preserved as fossils, even those with bones and shells. He also said “no organism wholly soft can be preserved”. However, after

A wall of sand over 100 meters (300 feet) high swallowed a city on the fringes of the Gobi desert in northwestern China, in scenes reminiscent of a disaster film. Dunhuang, a tourist draw with a colorful history as a Silk Road outpost, momentarily disappeared in the dust clouds as the storm hit on Sunday.

A lagoon in Argentina’s southern Patagonia region has turned bright pink in a striking, but frightful phenomenon experts and activists blame on pollution by a chemical used to preserve prawns for export. The color is caused by sodium sulfite, an anti-bacterial product used in fish factories, whose waste is blamed for contaminating the Chubut river

Making sense of the world after birth, let alone navigating it, isn’t something we expect human infants to do. Baby mice, however, seem to have a leg up on us when it comes to seeing the world with new eyes. Even before they have witnessed the world around them, a new study suggests newborn mice

Dig a teaspoon into your nearest clump of soil, and what you’ll emerge with will contain more microorganisms than there are people on Earth. We know this from lab studies that analyze samples of earth scooped from the microbial wild to determine which forms of microscopic life exist in the world beneath our feet. The

Australia’s sulphur-crested cockatoos have rapidly turned into big city birds. In Sydney, these large, white, and noisy parrots (Cacatua galerita) have fully adapted to the urban environment, quenching their thirst in public drinking fountains and foraging for food on the streets. Some have even learned how to throw open the lids of trash bins to comb through

Looking like the Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, an ancient undersea volcano was slowly revealed by multibeam sonar 3,100 meters (10,170 ft) below our vessel, 280 kilometers (174 miles) southeast of Christmas Island. This was on day 12 of our voyage of exploration to Australia’s Indian Ocean Territories, aboard CSIRO’s dedicated

A mangled trilobite, found fossilized in Czechia, looks like it narrowly escaped becoming lunch more than 450 million years ago. All that’s left of this ancient marine arthropod is the head, but researchers think the pincers of something like a giant sea scorpion could have been what amputated its eye, scratching the shell and scarring

Chimpanzees and gorillas are not known for violence towards each other, and the two hominid species live peacefully together in certain areas – so it’s surprising and saddening that researchers have witnessed lethal fights between them for the first time. Two separate encounters were observed in the Loango National Park in Gabon in 2019. Both

Like the start of a horror movie, ancient creatures are emerging from the cold storage of now-melting permafrost: from incredibly preserved extinct megafauna like the woolly rhino, to the 40,000-year-old remains of a giant wolf, and bacteria over 750,000 years old. Not all of them are dead. Centuries-old moss was able to spring back to life

Even when we mean them no harm, deer tend to be wary of humans. When we approach, they usually raise their heads, prick their ears and stand very still. It’s how these creatures stay vigilant against predators. But what happens when humans are always around? Researchers in Pennsylvania have found the presence of people threatens

Mysterious strands of DNA that seemingly assimilate genes from many different organisms in their surrounding environment have been discovered in a Californian backyard. Scientists have named these elements “Borgs”, and their discovery could help us not just understand the evolution of microorganisms, but their interactions within their ecosystems, and their role in the broader environment.

New life quite literally sparks into being, at least under fluorescence microscopy. That moment when sperm touches egg, billions of zinc atoms ignite across their now conjoined surfaces. This spectacular but minuscule phenomenon was first witnessed in human fertilization back in 2016. “It was remarkable,” said medical researcher Teresa Woodruff from Northwestern University, at the

If you’ve ever actually met a dog, new research into canine behavior will come as no shock. Scientists have found that “man’s best friend” won’t necessarily help said man out with a delicious snack, even if that man has given a snack first. This is actually a little surprising for animal researchers, though, since dogs

You’re running down the road and all of a sudden a car pulls out in front of you. In a split second your brain projects your location and predicts you will collide with the car., telling your muscles to engage in an evading maneuver. In this moment, your brain is paying more attention to where

Tiny little jumping spiders, with their magnificent eyes, seem to be able to do something we’d only ever seen before in vertebrates: distinguishing between animate and inanimate objects. In a new test, wild jumping spiders (Menemerus semilimbatus) behaved differently when presented with simulated objects of both kinds, in ways that indicated an ability to discern

The virus that causes COVID-19 was not the first pathogen to pass from animals to humans, and it surely won’t be the last. And though we may never pinpoint the exact animal source of SARS-CoV-2, we can hone our (re)search strategies to prepare for the next one. To do just that, a new study has

Shipworms are voracious munchers of wood. For thousands of years, these ‘termites of the sea’ have been sinking ships and collapsing wharves with their insatiable appetites. Today, we still don’t know how they devour so much woody plant material as fast as they do. “It’s unbelievable,” says microbiologist Reuben Shipway from the University of Portsmouth

Dogs are born with an innate ability to read human gestures that is not apparent in their closest relative, wolves. Even when wolf puppies are carefully raised by humans and hand-fed for weeks, researchers say the animals act skittish around strangers, make little eye contact, and don’t respond to basic gestures. In a round of

A slippery yellow slime that lives in the damp undergrowth is continuing to test our understanding of what it means to make decisions. Physarum polycephalum, AKA the many-headed slime mold, uses its body to physically sense its environment before making a decision about where it wants to go, new research has found. It’s the latest

Last week, wildlife officials in Utah yeeted thousands of fish out of a plane and into 200 high-elevation lakes across the state. The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources (DWR) has been dumping fish out of airplanes since 1956, Live Science previously reported. In a video that went viral this week, fish can be seen bursting

Newly discovered microfossils some 3.42 billion years old are the oldest evidence yet of a particular type of methane-cycling microbe life – and they could help us understand how life gets started in the first place, both on Earth and further out into the Universe. These life forms would have originally existed just below the

In what’s probably the most dramatic mass extinction in Earth’s history, an asteroid collided with our planet 66 million years ago, extinguishing 75 percent of living species – including all non-avian dinosaurs. Over the last few years, scientists have discovered many more traces of this cataclysmic impact, providing us with ever greater details of its extreme

This rarely seen glass octopus bared all recently – even a view of its innards – when an underwater robot filmed it gracefully soaring through the deep waters of the Central Pacific Ocean.  Marine biologists spotted the elusive glass octopus (Vitreledonella richardi) during a 34-day expedition off the remote Phoenix Islands, an archipelago located more than 3,200

Although we might think of ourselves as far removed from blobby green algae, we’re not really that different. An algae explosion a few hundred million years ago is thought to have been what allowed all human and animal life to evolve, and all told there’s only about one and a half billion years between us in

Have you ever stared at a cauliflower before preparing it and got lost in its stunningly beautiful pattern? Probably not, if you are in your right mind, but I reassure you it’s worth a try. What you’ll find is that what at first sight looks like an amorphous blob has a striking regularity. If you

Songbirds are mysteriously dying across the mid-Atlantic region of the USA.  Many have been discovered ill with eye swelling and discharge; some look like they’re having trouble lifting their heads, indicative of head swelling. They also show neurological symptoms like tremors, disorientation, erratic flight, and lack of balance.  Over 280 sick or dead birds have

Around 269 million people worldwide use drugs each year. Often forgotten in this story is a problem of basic biology. What goes in must come out. Sewers are inundated with drugs that are excreted from the body, along with the broken down chemical components that have similar effects to the drugs themselves. Sewage treatment plants

A towering inferno, hundreds of feet tall, burned above the Caspian Sea on Sunday (July 4) after a massive explosion in Azerbaijan’s oil and gas fields. The culprit? A mud volcano, authorities now say. The blast occurred around 9:30 pm local time (1:30 pm ET, 5:30 pm UTC) around 6 miles (10 kilometers) from the

Deep in the tissues of sea anemones, corals, and jellyfish are strange yellow cells which are genetically distinct from the marine animals. More than a century after these cells were first assigned a now forgotten genus, a new paper has resurrected the name and described six new species from around the world. “Because our team

A pandemonium of parrots, a cackle of hyenas, an exaltation of larks – these are just a few of the animals that we define by the sounds they make.  For humans, communication is the bedrock of our relationships and part of how we successfully function in our daily lives. Animals make sounds to issue warnings,

Within the depths of a Malaysian rainforest’s shadows an astonishingly plant, lacking sunlight-eating leaves, bizarrely blooms. This small, otherworldly growth, belonging to a group of rare flowering plants known as fairy lanterns (Thismia), has just been scientifically described for the first time. They’re tiny plants, too deep within the forest to receive sunlight, and often

Microbes fished from the stomachs of cows can gobble up certain kinds of plastic, including the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) used in soda bottles, food packaging, and synthetic fabrics. Scientists uncovered these microbes in liquid that was drawn from the rumen, the largest compartment of a ruminant’s stomach; ruminants include hooved animals like cattle and sheep,

Record heat and growing wildfires are creating firestorms that can generate their own lightning in the skies above British Columbia, Canada. As heat and smoke from large fires rise skyward, they can create firestorms comprised of what are known as pyrocumulonimbus clouds. These thunderheads produce their own weather, including tornadoes in rare cases, which can then

Way back in the Late Triassic period, in what is now modern day Poland, a long-snouted dinosaur ate a big meal of green algae and then took a poop. It was a day like any other for the animal, but for us, roughly 230-million years later, those very fossilized feces have revealed an entire family

A new study suggests that the extra time being pampered by their humans during lockdowns has made many cats appear more affectionate. This may be a surprise for some, given cats’ often unfair reputation of being aloof. Many of us know first-hand how valuable our pets have been during the weirdness and stress of the pandemic and associated lockdowns.

The most complex life forms ever developed entirely in Petri dishes can pump blood through tiny beating hearts, gradually growing nerves and muscles in a laboratory. These little collections of mammalian cells form rudimentary mouse embryos, built from scratch out of stem cells – cells that have the potential to develop into any other cell

A very rare mineral that’s previously been found only in extraterrestrial meteorites has been discovered in Earth’s own rocks for the first time, lying in a sedimentary formation not far from the shores of the Dead Sea. Allabogdanite, a phosphide mineral, was unknown to science until just a couple of decades ago, after fragments of

Scorpions and tarantulas are two ancient arachnids that have been walking the Earth for hundreds of millions of years – even before the time of the dinosaurs. And the question of which would win in a fight has been the subject of numerous YouTube videos, online forums and even research papers. Well, with more than

After ruling the planet for more than 170 million years, non-avian dinosaurs were suddenly demoted from existence by the impact of a large asteroid that struck the Yucatán peninsula some 66 million years ago.  The collision set off a cascade of environmental devastation, with debris in the atmosphere cutting off life-giving sunlight. Earth’s surface temperatures

A “heat dome” over western Canada and the US Pacific northwest sent temperatures soaring to new highs, triggering heat warnings from Oregon to Canada’s Arctic territories on Sunday. More than 40 new temperature highs were recorded in British Columbia over the weekend, including in the ski resort town of Whistler. And the high pressure ridge

A tiny, 120 million-year-old fossil, discovered in northeast China, is neither bird nor dinosaur but is perched on its own evolutionary branch, somewhere in between. While the 2-centimeter-long (0.75-inch) skull of this little fella holds similarities to much larger dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex, its thin and delicate body looks more like modern-day crown birds, such as

Camels have an incredible ability to survive weeks without taking even a sip of water. Now, we have a better idea of the secret ingredient that helps their bodies achieve this. We already know that to save every drop of liquid, camels have a host of biological tricks – including large and intricate noses that