All Stories
- Agriculture
Scientists Say: Domestication
Domestication is the process of deliberately taking a wild organism — a plant or animal for instance — and making it a part of our daily lives.
- Animals
Wildebeest drownings feed a river ecosystem for years
Hundreds or thousands of wildebeests can drown at a time in the Mara River. Those carcasses, however, will feed a succession of other animals.
- Tech
Cool Jobs: Bringing you summer thrills
Fireworks and ride designers combine math and science to engineer some frightfully good summer fun.
- Oceans
How the Arctic Ocean became salty
The Arctic Ocean was once a huge freshwater lake, separated from the Atlantic by a ridge of land. Scientists explore how salt water overtook it.
- Chemistry
New ‘magnet’ pulls pesky nonstick pollutants from drinking water
Chemicals that help make pans nonstick can themselves stick around forever in the environment. But a new material can remove them from drinking water.
- Health & Medicine
Explainer: What is a vaccine?
Vaccines give the body’s natural defense system a boost against infectious disease.
- Animals
Evolving for flight may have changed the shapes of bird eggs
Birds that are strong fliers tend to have stretched-out or asymmetrical eggs. This might reflect how their bodies evolved for flight.
- Life
Scientists Say: Biofilm
When times get tough, some microbes like to stick together. They form a mass stuck to a surface, called a biofilm.
- Animals
Listening to fish love songs can predict their numbers
Gulf corvinas croak for mates while in groups of millions. By listening to their undersea serenades, scientists may be able to estimate how many are out there.
- Agriculture
Bee hotels are open for business
Bee hotels are creating a buzz in conservation and research by offering nesting places for wild bees.
- Earth
Antarctic ice shelf sheds Delaware-sized iceberg
Larsen C is a major ice shelf in Antarctica. An iceberg the size of Delaware has just splintered off of it in one of the largest calving events ever recorded.
- Planets
Small, distant worlds are either big Earths or little Neptunes
The Kepler space telescope data are in. They split Earth-like exoplanets into two groups and reveal 10 new rocky planets in the ‘Goldilocks’ zone.
