Across the United States, kids are prepping for back-to-school, or are already in classrooms, and parents are buckling up for another pandemic school year. Like me, many are trying to get a handle on what COVID-19 precautions to take. Updated guidance released last week by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hasn’t exactly […]

There’s nothing like a big mass extinction to open up ecological niches and clear out the competition, accelerating evolution for some lucky survivors. Or is there? A new study suggests that the rate of climate change may play just as large a role in speeding up evolution. The study focuses on reptile evolution across 57 […]

Mini-Neptunes and super-Earths may have a lot more in common than just being superlatives. Four gaseous exoplanets, each a bit smaller than Neptune, seem to be evolving into super-Earths, rocky worlds up to 1.5 times the width of our home planet. That’s because the intense radiation of their stars appears to be pushing away the […]

Scientists have mapped out the dark matter around some of the earliest, most distant galaxies yet. The 1.5 million galaxies appear as they were 12 billion years ago, or less than 2 billion years after the Big Bang. Those galaxies distort the cosmic microwave background — light emitted during an even earlier era of the […]

In the upper reaches of the Skykomish River in Washington state, a pioneering team of civil engineers is keeping things cool. Relocated beavers boosted water storage and lowered stream temperatures, indicating such schemes could be an effective tool to mitigate some of the effects of climate change. In just one year after their arrival, the […]

The balloon was floating over the Pacific Ocean when the first sound waves hit. For 11 seconds, a tiny device dangling beneath the large, transparent balloon recorded sudden, jerky fluctuations in air pressure: echoes of an earthquake more than 2,800 kilometers away. That scientific instrument was one of four hovering high above the Malay Archipelago […]

The next time you spot a sea sponge, say “gesundheit!” Some sponges regularly “sneeze” to clear debris from their porous bodies. As filter feeders, sponges draw in water through inlet pores — called ostia — and strain it through an internal canal system for nutrients. But there are also inedible bits in the water, like […]

Sukari the gorilla can grunt. She can hum. She can grumble. Now, scientists report, the gorilla’s got a new way to express herself. Sukari can “snough.” She and other zoo gorillas make the noise, a cross between a sneeze and a cough, when zookeepers with food are near. The unusual utterance, which has not been […]