Life as a scribe in Ancient Egypt took its toll on the body. Researchers examining the bones of these ancient writers found them riddled with arthritis and other work-related wear and tear,  offering fascinating insights into their lives. They detailed their findings in a study published in the journal Scientific Reports.Researchers from the Czech Republic studied the remains of 69 individuals who were buried in the Abusir necropolis in Egypt over 4000 years ago, between 2700 and 2180 B.C.E. Th ...read more

Billions of birds are flying south for the annual fall migration, including 4.7 billion leaving the U.S. alone, bound for Mexico, Central and South America. Sadly, over the past 50 years, North American bird populations dropped by nearly 3 billion, due to habitat loss, climate change, and massive development along their flight paths. An estimated one billion deaths per year are due to building collisions, with light pollution being an amplifying factor.We (scientists, conservationists, media and ...read more

The blue whale is renowned as the Earth’s largest animal, taking that title today by quite some distance. That holds true even stretching back through time as these enormous marine mammals are even bigger than some of the largest of the dinosaurs.How Big Is a Blue Whale?(Credit: Ajit S N/Shutterstock)The largest blue whale ever found stretched 33 meters (108 feet) and was caught by whalers in the early 1900s. Usually, however, they can range between 24 and 30 meters (78-98 feet) in length, dep ...read more

Bite force is the amount of pressure and force in an animal’s bite. It’s measured in psi (pounds per square inch). But no matter the unit of measurement when these mega-predators chomp down, you’d better hope you’re not on the receiving end of it. Just to give you some perspective, the bite force of a measly human is just 162 psi. Here are some animals with the strongest bite force.  1. Nile Crocodiles — 5000 PSI(Credit: KateShots/Shutterstock) Nile crocodiles are the second largest ...read more

After delivering a guest lecture on sticklebacks, an unfamiliar fish caught Stanford University researcher David Kingsley’s eye. When he walked past an aquarium at the Woods Hole Marine Biology Laboratory, a strange aquatic creature stopped him in his tracks.“I did this huge double take because I looked in this one tank, and there was one of the weirdest fish I've ever seen,” says Kingsley. “It had the body of a fish, the wings of a bird, and it was walking along the bottom of the tank o ...read more

Under warm summer conditions, the sea ice stretching across much of the Arctic Ocean shriveled much more dramatically than it did during cooler summers of decades past, the National Snow and Ice Data Center has reported."While it wasn’t a new record low, this year’s sea ice minimum is yet another example of a changed Arctic environment," said Walt Meier, an NSIDC senior research scientist.Every year, the Arctic's floating sea ice shrinks under summer warmth, typically reaching a minimum exte ...read more

The mournful eyes, the lingering stares, the sad sighs. Many pet parents leave the house each day with a dog or cat watching somberly from the window.Social scientists have found that pet owners experience ongoing guilt about wanting to do better for their animals. Researchers have called it an understudied topic that needs to be better considered, particularly as more workers are called back into the office full-time. Why Owners Feel Guilty About Leaving Their PetsPsychologist Lori Kogan felt ...read more

The human mind is unlike any other. It’s the key that unlocked language, culture, abstract reasoning, long-term planning, and large-scale political coordination — all the cognitive features that set us so far apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. It need not diminish other creatures’ intelligence to describe ourselves, in the words of British psychologist Cecilia Heyes, as “animals that specialize in thinking and knowing.”Yet, in another sense, we aren’t so separate from the res ...read more

An ancient Roman tomb discovered during home renovations in southern Spain contains cremated bones and ashes that have been soaking for two millennia in white wine.“This is the oldest wine discovered to date,” says José Ruiz Arrebola, a chemist at the University of Cordoba in Spain.This wine, along with the associated findings, is revealing more about ancient Roman funerary rituals in Spain.Where was the Oldest Wine in the World Discovered?The wine was discovered in 2019 in Carmona, Spain, ...read more

Many wonder how birds migrate vast distances. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences investigates that and also looks into the “where,” “when,” and “why” of avian travel. They found that birds flock to drastically different environmental conditions that meet different needs over the course of a year.Crane TrackingResearchers affixed GPS tracking devices to the legs of 104 cranes in Africa, Asia, and Europe. They learned that some cranes traveled nearly 4,000 m ...read more