When you hear the word “nature,” you’re likely to think of your last camping trip to a state park, or of grandiose landscapes with forests, lakes, and snow-capped mountains. You may remember the last trip to the beach and the variety of birds you saw while sunbathing. There are likely many images that pop into your head when you hear the word but the image of a city is likely not one of them. The City Nature Challenge hopes to change that. What is the City Nature Challenge and ...read more

Diamond is the hardest natural material, but now scientists have shown that it can bend and stretch, much like rubber, and even elastically snap back into shape — even if it only happens with diamonds that are very small. Such flexibility could open up a wide new range of applications for diamond, the researchers say. Diamond is extraordinarily hard, meaning it excels at resisting any change to its shape — that’s why a diamond can cut through softer materials and will only be ...read more

The average cow needs cranial surgery like it needs a hole in the head, but for one ancient bovine, it appears that's exactly what the doctor ordered. Researchers describing a hole in the skull of a Neolithic cow say it's possibly the earliest example of veterinary surgery — though it may have also been mere practice for performing the procedure on a human patient. Trepanation, or the act of intentionally making a hole in the skull, has a long history in our species (and it's ...read more

The 'shark' will soon gobble up La Niña's cool surface waters. What might this mean for the climate later this year? It's not every day that you see an animated graphic like the one above hosted on the website of an ordinarily staid U.S. government agency. And yes, that is indeed an illustration comparing a complex Earth system phenomenon to, well, a shark. The comparison comes from the fabulous folks at the ENSO Blog, published under the aegis of the Nat ...read more

Almost two miles below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, on a lonely outcrop of bare rock 100 miles from Costa Rica, researchers on a geological expedition found something odd. As their remotely controlled submersible sunk through the black waters toward the seafloor, they saw a collection of purple lumps dotting the rocky bottom. As they got closer, they resolved themselves into something resembling a bowling ball with suckers. It was a group of female octopuses, of the genus Muusoct ...read more

It's intuitive: We hear a message, think about it, and decide whether or not we believe it. We have to do it whenever we get a new piece of information in our lives, from politics to the news to gossip, so you’d think we’d be good at it by now. But studies constantly show that our squishy human brains don’t make it quite so easy. Presenting information in different ways — whether there’s a photo included, or changing the colors of the words — affects our inte ...read more

Earth has been taking a very slight breather this year from the seemingly unrelenting record-setting global temperatures observed in the previous two years. And this past month was no exception. By NASA's accounting, March 2018 was the sixth warmest such month in records dating back to 1880. In an independent analysis, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration pegged March as fifth warmest. And for the first quarter of the year (January through March), NOAA shows the pe ...read more

Would you get on a plane that didn’t have a human pilot in the cockpit? Half of air travelers surveyed in 2017 said they would not, even if the ticket was cheaper. Modern pilots do such a good job that almost any air accident is big news, such as the Southwest engine disintegration on Tuesday. But stories of pilot drunkenness, rants, fights and distraction, however rare, are reminders that pilots are only human. Not every plane can be flown by a disaster-averting pilot, like Southwest Cap ...read more

Beans, beans, the musical fruit! The more you eat, the more you toot! Well, not according to this oldie-but-goody study (published in 1984, doubleplusgood!). Here, scientists had 12 men eat kidney beans for 23 days and measured how much they farted. It turns out that the gas quantity didn't change during that time, no matter if the men typically ate a lot of beans or not. However, the longer they ate the beans, the better they felt (less discomfort). So let's eat beans for every meal! Inf ...read more

How long is the U.S. coastline? It's a straightforward question, and one that's important for scientists and government agencies alike. The U.S. Geological Survey could give you an answer, too, but I'm going to tell you right now that it's wrong. In fact, no one could give you the right answer, and if you look around, you'll find a number of estimations that differ by seemingly improbable amounts. One government report lists the number as 12,383 miles. The same report admits that a differ ...read more