A long-toed bird preserved in amber from Myanmar is the first of its kind. (Credit: Lida Xing) Smaller than a sparrow, a bird that lived 99 million years ago in what's now Southeast Asia had legs unlike any other avian. The bird's hindlimb features one toe longer than its entire lower leg bone. Lucky for paleontologists, a piece of amber has preserved the animal's odd anatomy. Found in Burmese amber and identified as new species, Elektorornis chenguangi is known only from one hindl ...read more

The world's most widely-used personality test isn't relevant for much of the world. (Credit: By Gustavo Frazao / Shutterstock) A lot of contemporary psychology research is based on the assumption that there are five basic dimensions of personality that define people around the world. It’s called the “Big Five” personality model, and it assumes that each of our personalities are a unique blend of a handful of traits: extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness ...read more

Voyager 2 shut down an instrument heater, but is still going strong, more than forty years after launch. (Credit: NASA/ESA/G. Bacon/STScI) Launched in 1977, Voyagers 1 and 2 are the longest-running spacecraft, still operating at more than 11 billion miles from home, decades after the end of their nominal goal of exploring the outer solar system planets. They still get their power from the same three radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs, that have served them for years. But with th ...read more

Theories state that some black holes could have formed within the first second of the Big Bang. (Credit: NASA/ESA and G. Bacon (STScI)) All the black holes that astronomers have seen fall into one of three categories: stellar-mass black holes, intermediate-mass black holes, and supermassive black holes. Each is more massive than our Sun and formed at least hundreds of thousands of years after the Big Bang, as our universe grew and evolved. But there is another type of black hole astronom ...read more

The blueheaded wrasse. (Credit: Leonardo Gonzalez/shutterstock) Sex transitions are commonplace for several species of fish, and that's consistently puzzling for scientists. How these changes occur on a genetic level is still not fully understood, but a new study published in the journal Science offers some insights. A team of researchers say they've found that social stressors may play a role in triggering a cascade of hormonal changes in the bluehead wrasse, a small, coral-loving fish ...read more

(Credit: anetta/shutterstock) Anyone who’s hung out with babies knows how eager they are to communicate, even if they can’t do it very well. One way they do this is with the gesture of pointing, sticking out the index finger to indicate some object without touching it. Babies all over the world point in roughly the same way, starting at around 9 to 14 months. It’s a fundamental part of human interactions, as borne out by so many emojis. But as important as pointing is to ...read more

The skull fragment known as Apidima 1 (right) is about 210,000 years old, according to a new analysis. Seen from the rear (middle) and side (left) in a reconstruction, the partial skull's rounded shape shares a unique feature of modern humans. (Credit: Katerina Harvati, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen) A scrap of skullcap collected in 1978 and stored for decades in an Athens museum may rewrite the timeline of our species leaving our ancestral African homeland. A new analysis of ...read more

Planting trees, while beneficial to the planet, is not an easy solution to climate change. (Credit: Janelle Lugge/Shutterstock) Last week, a new study in the journal Science highlighted the role forests could play in tackling climate change. Researchers estimated that by restoring forests to their maximum potential, we could cut down atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) by 25 percent — a move that would take us back to levels not seen in over a century. Though the study brings hope in the f ...read more

Clownfish rely on darkness to hatch. Human lights are stealing it away. (Credit: patrik johnson/Shutterstock) From space, the picture is crystal clear. Across the globe, cities twinkle with artificial light against the night sky. And the nocturnal expanse is only getting brighter. Scientists estimate the amount of artificial light at night grows by more than two percent every year. The nighttime glow carries detrimental consequences for human health and disrupts animal behaviors like mig ...read more

(Credit: ISRO) India is expected to launch their second lunar mission, Chandrayaan-2 on July 14. The launch will take up an orbiter, a lander, and a rover, dubbed Pragyan, all designed to study the moon’s little explored south pole. Using the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) most powerful rocket, Chandrayaan-2 will reach Earth’s orbit, where it’ll spend about 16 days before it heads over to the moon. After a short time in lunar orbit, the lander and t ...read more