Many things go wrong when a human spends months alone in a dark cave. Time stills and the body’s rhythms go awry. Sleep withers to a few hours a night, and menstruation may come to a halt. Enthralling stories, like that of Spanish climber and cave-dweller Beatrice Flamini's, shed light on what motivates someone to become a cave dweller.Flamini's Life as a Cave DwellerOn April 14, Flamini emerged from a cave in the country after spending a record 500 days isolated underground, save for a “tec ...read more

With the help of a local fisherman, identified as Jesus Artemio Poot Villa, scientists found the second-deepest blue hole in the world in an unlikely place — the shallow Chetumal Bay located on the southeastern side of the Yucatan Peninsula. Filled with a hostile, oxygen-starved environment, the newly-named Taam Ja’ Blue Hole (TJBH) could one day invite research into how life could survive on alien planets or other harsh environments.What Is a Blue Hole?A blue hole is a vertical cave typical ...read more

Elephants love eating bananas, and feast on them whole whenever they can. But Pang Pha, a 36-year-old Asian elephant who lives at the Berlin Zoo, is a little more precious: she happens to prefer her bananas peeled. While growing up, Pha was under the custody of an attentive caretaker who used to peel her bananas for her. Now, she seems to have taught herself to break the banana against her trunk and wriggle the insides of the fruit from its peel, discarding the latter and savoring just the pulp. ...read more

Mars is a frigid world today, and all of its surface water is frozen solid. However, there’s ample evidence that liquid water once coursed over the Red Planet. That paradox has sparked an ongoing debate: What warmed up Mars’s climate billions of years ago? A team now has proposed that giant asteroid impacts—the kinds that carve out basins exceeding 1,200 kilometers in diameter—might have played an important role. The team reported its results in March in Geophysical Research Letters.Th ...read more

You’d be forgiven for thinking that brushing your cat’s teeth is not worth the risk to life and limb (or at least fingers). But it’s something you might want to reconsider.We know that if we don’t brush our own teeth, they’ll eventually fall out, right? Well, that can happen to cats, too. In fact, periodontal disease is distressingly common in our furry friends.According to the Feline Health Center at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, between 50 and 90 percent of c ...read more

As science uncovers the more fine-tuned and unique ways that human brains operate, the terms neurodivergence and neurodiversity are becoming more popular.The word neurodiversity only emerged in the late 1990s, thanks to Australian sociologist Judy Singer.What Does Neurodivergent Mean?Neurodivergent is a non-medical umbrella term that refers to a wide range of conditions including autism, dyslexia and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). And it is now appearing more frequently in ever ...read more

This article was originally published in Eos. New Zealand straddles the boundary of two tectonic plates and as a result is in a constant state of upheaval. As mountains rise and fall, rivers are split, diverted, and joined. In some cases, they have even reversed flow.A geologist, a biologist, and an ecologist recently put their expertise together to simultaneously trace the movement of fish and gold through the country’s rivers. The results point to hidden riches, and the team’s approach has ...read more

Neil deGrasse Tyson's latest book, Starry Messenger, analyzes real-world issues like race, gender and politics using scientific methods. In a recent interview with Tyson, we asked why he thought it was important to view these issues through a scientific lens. He answered in true Tyson fashion, "Well, nobody else was."A Starry MessengerStarry Messenger wants us to take a step back and look at contradictions from a different perspective — a cosmic perspective if you will. Tyson takes a ra ...read more

Imagine living in a world with a bus-sized “three-horned face” dinosaur that has epic battles with an intimidating carnivore like the Tyrannosaurus rex (or so the legend says). From all we’ve gathered so far, it is not hard to see that Triceratops horridus, also known as Triceratops (genus), is a distinct beast. Triceratops is a quadrupedal dinosaur of the ceratopsian family – herbivores from the Cretaceous period with a bony frill and distinct beaklike bone. They used to live in western ...read more