In the heart of Egypt’s Western Desert, the wind lifts grains of sand and lays them down again over bones older than humanity’s oldest stories. This is Wadi Al-Hitan, the Valley of the Whales, where the desert remembers the sea and refuses to let the past disappear. The mystery is disarming: how do whales end ...
Under a crust of fractured ice, Europa may shelter the largest body of liquid water in the solar system – more than Earth’s oceans combined – and that single fact has gripped scientists for decades. The mystery isn’t just whether water is there, but whether the chemistry and energy to power life have persisted in ...
It looks like a smear of egg yolk on agar, slow and indecisive – until you give it a problem and watch it go to work. The slime mold Physarum polycephalum doesn’t have a brain, neurons, or even a mouth, yet it can find efficient routes through a maze like a tiny yellow cartographer. Scientists ...
Across the windswept uplands of northern Laos, thousands of massive stone jars sit silently in the grass, as if a vanished people had stepped away and never returned. Archaeologists have mapped scores of jar fields and logged more than two thousand vessels, yet a definitive answer to their purpose remains elusive. The stakes are not ...
They arrive like quiet rumors on a thermal, drawing spirals in the sky until the ground pulls them down to work. Vultures – maligned, meme-ified, misunderstood – are the most efficient clean-up crew in the animal world, and their shift never ends. When they vanish, rot lingers longer, other scavengers crowd in, and bacteria multiply ...
Picture the closing chapters of the Cretaceous, when shorelines were louder, skies busier, and the largest flying animals ever known prowled like herons with skyscraper wings. The puzzle scientists are still piecing together is how such giants rose from the ground, hunted, and survived in a world already tipping toward catastrophe. New analyses of fossil ...
On a crowded reef, small problems can become big emergencies: parasites sap energy, open wounds invite infection, and a bad reputation can get you chased off your own rock. Into this drama steps a tiny professional with a giant promise. Cleaner shrimp run bustling service stations where fish line up for a tune-up – parasites ...
It began as a miracle in bone: a long, straight horn, a hulking spine, and the promise that myth could be real. In early modern Europe, collectors craved wonders, and the so-called Magdeburg Unicorn delivered a spectacle – part science, part stagecraft. But the fossil fairy tale unraveled as researchers learned to read the deep ...
Some of the most unsettling and exciting discoveries in modern neuroscience point to a single, uncomfortable truth: your brain is far less fixed than you think, and that means your excuses are shakier than you might like. Neuroplasticity – the brain’s ability to rewire itself throughout life – has moved from fringe idea to central ...
Every time we think we’ve got the universe roughly figured out, nature drops something on the table that feels less like science and more like a plot twist from a surreal movie. In the last few decades especially, astronomers and physicists have uncovered phenomena so extreme that even seasoned researchers admit they sound made up ...
