Getting out into society after a long isolation gets awkward. Ask the Pahrump poolfish, loners in a desert for some 10,000 years. This hold-in-your-hand-size fish (Empetrichthys latos) has a chubby, torpedo shape and a mouth that looks as if it’s almost smiling. Until the 1950s, this species had three forms, each evolving in its own […]

The massive Tonga eruption generated a set of planet-circling tsunamis that may have started out as a single mound of water roughly the height of the Statue of Liberty. What’s more, the explosive eruption triggered an immense atmospheric shock wave that spawned a second set of especially fast-moving tsunamis, a rare phenomenon that can complicate […]