Life
- Environment
Teen engineer finds eco-friendly way to fight harmful algal blooms
The Netflix series Outer Banks inspired this teen engineer to help clean up algal blooms in a local waterway.
- Tech
Backyard leafhoppers inspire next-generation cloaking tech
Engineers are borrowing this insect’s trick, an "invisibility cloak" of anti-reflective spheres. It could lead to new clean energy tech or military gear.
- Life
After the dino-killer asteroid, life bounced back quickly
New ocean dwellers arrived millennia — maybe decades — after the Chicxulub impact. That forces a rethink of evolution's response to wipeout events.
- Environment
Human-built ‘beaver’ dams help save struggling streams
To help restore streams, ecologists and other scientists are taking tips from the rodents — and hoping some beavers also join in.
- Animals
Let’s learn about the platypus
Every new discovery about platypuses reveals them to be even odder than we thought.
- Animals
Wind won’t keep hungry yellow jackets away from your picnic
Hungry yellow jackets are really good at tracking attractive odors. Even in windy and difficult conditions, they can find your barbecue.
- Fossils
Fossil vomit shows what one 290-million-year-old predator dined on
Bones in the barfed-up material, which dates to a time before the dinosaurs, offer a rare peek into the diet of a prehistoric hunter.
- Physics
Scientists Say: Discharge
In physics, this release of energy can rebalance electrical charges. In biology, such a release might cool you down on a hot day.
- Microbes
Analyze This: Which cells are the speediest?
The cellular Olympics would be an amazing spectacle. Some cells move at mind-boggling speeds by jumping, gliding, swimming, expanding or shrinking.
- Animals
Intricate silk helps net-casting spiders trap prey in webs
Rufous net-casting spiders can adjust the stiffness and stretchiness of their webs thanks to looping strands of silk.
- Health & Medicine
Got brain rot?
Excessive scrolling through social media or viral videos can mess with your mental health — and possibly alter your brain’s development, studies show.
- Animals
A bonobo’s imaginary tea party hints that apes can pretend
Kanzi would sometimes play with imaginary juice and grapes, just as humans might. The bonobo's ability challenges old ideas about how animals think.
