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Kate Furby: Some caterpillars have evolved with antifreeze in their body cavities, allowing them to become cater-Popsicles to survive cold winters. But climate change could threaten that.  Martha Weiss: So there are caterpillars that have been reported to be put into an ice cube and frozen, and then when the ice cube melts, they can get […]

For the first time, astronomers think they’ve spotted two pairs of merging dwarf galaxies, with each pair sporting a duo of soon-to-collide black holes. The observations could reveal new details about the early formation of large galaxies like our own Milky Way, as well as the supermassive black holes that lurk at their centers. Despite […]

CLIMATEWIRE | Boreal forest fires in northern Eurasia and North America — including parts of Canada, Alaska and Siberia — spewed record-breaking levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2021, new research finds. In a typical year, these northern blazes account for about 10 percent of the planet’s wildfire-related carbon emissions. But in 2021, their […]

We may never know when a human jumped on a horse and rode off into the sunset for the first time, but archaeologists are hard at work trying to understand how horses left the wild and joined humans on the trail to global domination. New research purports to have found the earliest evidence of horseback […]

Intelligence reports have a checkered history. They have recently seized center stage in the debate over the origin of the pandemic virus. With a change of mind at the Department of Energy, and a mere restatement of position at the FBI, those arguing that the SARS-CoV-2 virus leaked from a lab at the Wuhan Institute […]

As a research scholar at the Indian Institute for Science Education and Research, I once monitored birds that inhabited tall wet grasslands in Daying Ering Memorial Wildlife Sanctuary, a protected area in Northeast India. This habitat forms a part of one of the most biodiverse places on Earth. Yet despite their ecological importance and uniqueness, […]

What is your favorite number? Many people may have an irrational number in mind, such as pi (π), Euler’s number (e) or the square root of 2. But even among the natural numbers, you can find values that you encounter in a wide variety of contexts: the seven dwarfs, the seven deadly sins, 13 as […]

Perhaps unknowingly, airline passengers who lived through the outage of the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA’s) Notice to Air Systems (NOTAM) system in January or Southwest Airlines’ meltdown in December were part of history. The NOTAM outage was the first time the FAA paused all domestic departures in the U.S. since 9/11. This ground stop of […]

Last September, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft smashed into an asteroid, deliberately altering the rock’s trajectory through space in a first test of planetary defence. Now scientists have deconstructed the collision and its aftermath — and learnt just how successful humanity’s punch at the cosmos really was. DART, which was the size of a […]

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s calamitous invasion of Ukraine has killed at least tens of thousands, displaced millions, and disrupted countless lives around the globe. Putin’s implied threats to use nuclear weapons against any who would interfere, have also raised fears of a nuclear conflict in ways not seen since the end of the cold war. […]