Cave-dwelling creatures often bear the characteristics of animals unaccustomed to light. Their skin, or scales, are blanched, and their eyes range from “of little use” to purely ornamental. But that doesn’t stop the serpentine cave salamanders of southeastern Europe from sneaking up to the surface now and again. How Isolation Plays a Role in Space … Read more
De-extinction startup Colossal Biosciences wants to bring back the woolly mammoth. Well, not the woolly mammoth exactly, but an Asian elephant gene-edited to give it the fuzzy hair and layer of blubber that allowed its close relative to thrive in sub-zero environments. To get to these so-called “functional mammoths,” Colossal’s scientists need to solve a … Read more
Legend has it that the world has the French Revolution to thank for Camembert. The cheese with hints of caramelized butter and earthy mushrooms dates back to 1791, when a fleeing priest is said to have shared the recipe with a farm woman from Camembert who’d welcomed him into her home. But Camembert and its … Read more
Astronomers are excited about this one. Using a sprawling astronomical array in the lofty Chilean desert — the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) — scientists found huge volumes of water around a young, developing solar system (technically still in its “protoplanetary disk” phase). The star, HL Tauri, is located 450 light-years away in space. Yet … Read more
OTTAWA, Ontario — Two scientists at a high-security infectious disease laboratory in Canada lost their jobs after reviews found they failed to protect sensitive material and information and did not acknowledge links with China, newly released records show. The scientists, Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng, were stripped of their security clearances in 2019 … Read more
It’s been weeks since the stunning first episode of HBO’s True Detective: Night Country, helmed by showrunner Issa López. That’s when we first saw the scientists at the Tsalal Arctic Research Station ditch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, run out into the snow, and freeze into a horrific corpsicle on the Alaskan tundra. But how did … Read more
So what’s going on here? For one, the oceans have been steadily warming over the decades, absorbing something like 90 percent of the extra heat that humans have added to the atmosphere. “The oceans are our saviors, in a way,” says biological oceanographer Francisco Chavez of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California. “Things … Read more
“Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links.” The Paris Climate Accords in 2015 set an ambitious (and necessary) goal of keeping global temperatures at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temps. But a new study says we might’ve blown past that threshold several years ago. A new study … Read more
While boating off the coast of Australia, scientists saw a “massive splash” — and encountered a sea creature with “extremely rare” coloring. Meet Speckles. “It was near the end of the day, we were about to head in and we saw this massive leap, this massive splash so we thought we’d go over to investigate,” … Read more
Herculaneum scroll with red laser lines being scanned at Institut de France by Brent Seales and his team. EduceLab. After a historic volcanic eruption, two millennia, and an international effort to use artificial intelligence to read a set of mysterious ancient scrolls, researchers know what at least one Roman Epicurean philosopher had on his mind: … Read more