When I heard the U.S. was having a blood shortage during the pandemic, I decided to roll up my sleeve and donate for the first time. As I watched the second donation bag fill, I chatted casually with the technician and thought I’d soon be on my way.And then, the sides of my vision began going dark, and the room in front of me faded. The technician immediately lowered the top half of my cot and raised my feet. He put cold compresses on my neck and tried to get me to stay alert with a conversati ...read more

Back in the late 1980s, a Canadian engineer called Tad McGeer built a remarkable pair of mechanical legs that were unpowered, had no actuators, no sensors and no computer control. But set them in motion down a slight incline and they started to walk with the lazy rolling gait of a gunslinging cowboy. By contrast, robotic legs are packed with sensors to monitor the position of each joint, computer processors to plan the trajectory of every movement and actuators to push the limbs into position. A ...read more

The extensive charcoal cave art at the Gura Sireh Cave on the island of Borneo appears to reflect decades of frontier violence, according to a new analysis.Cave art continued in Southeast Asia until the relatively recent past, the new paper says. Scientists carbon-dated some of Gura Sireh’s drawings to a period between 1670 and 1830. At the time, the indigenous hill tribes, the Bidayuh, suffered at the hands of the local Malay elites, who ruled the countryside.The cave art at Gura Sireh is onl ...read more

In the 1790s, George Shaw faced something of a mystery. As a keeper of the natural history department of the British Museum (which later became the Natural History Museum), Shaw had already spent some time examining samples of exotic wildlife coming from the newly colonized and largely unexplored continent of Australia.But around 1799, Shaw was presented with a pelt and a drawing of an Australian creature that seemed to be too exotic. Its physical features were so astonishing, he and others init ...read more

Animals can suffer from many of the same mental illnesses that humans do, such as anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But there’s one mental illness that, at least as far as we can tell, that animals don’t get: schizophrenia. Schizophrenia and Animals Admittedly, it would be difficult to know if an animal were suffering from schizophrenia. The National Library of Medicine describes the symptoms of schizophrenia as including hall ...read more

The creatures of the open ocean are often flashy, in both an abstract and literal sense, thanks to the flickering luminosity of many marine organisms. But maybe more fantastic than glittering squid and glowing, frilled fish are a group of animals that resemble nothing more than globs of gelatin or tangles of twine. Drifting through the mysterious depths of the water, siphonophores reach surprising lengths, and rule as some of the longest animals in the world.[embedded content]What Are Siphonopho ...read more

Elephant seals don’t need a hypnotist to spiral them deep into sleep: New research reveals that these marine mammals take deep, spiraling dives to catch a few short power naps every day while on long ocean voyages — so few that they might be the recorder-holders for sleep deprivation among mammals during these periods.“That’s pretty much unparalleled compared to any other mammal,” says Jessica Kendall-Bar, a marine biologist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the Universit ...read more

Memes galore centered on the “orca revolution” have inundated the online realm. They gleefully depict orcas launching attacks on boats in the Strait of Gibraltar and off the Shetland coast.One particularly ingenious image showcases an orca posed as a sickle crossed with a hammer. The cheeky caption reads, “Eat the rich,” a nod to the orcas’ penchant for sinking lavish yachts.A surfboard-snatching sea otter in Santa Cruz, California has also claimed the media spotlight. Headlines ...read more

Billions of years ago, the quiet moon we know today was once a wild and violent place washed by volcanic eruptions, according to new data from the Chinese Yutu-2 rover.After gamely setting down on the dark side of the moon in January 2019, the rover took thousands of readings of underground structures using its ground-penetrating radar – and this new paper is based on three years of reporting.While the readings have attracted scientific attention, they’ve also attracted some scrutiny. Resear ...read more

French novelist Jules Verne delighted 19th-century readers with the tantalizing notion that a journey to the center of the Earth was actually plausible.Since then, scientists have long acknowledged that Verne’s literary journey was only science fiction. The extreme temperatures of the Earth’s interior – around 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,537 Celsius) at the core – and the accompanying crushing pressure, which is millions of times more than at the surface, prevent people from venturin ...read more