At the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, five eels live in the Amazon Rising habitat, where probes in the water sense their electricity and transmit their energy to a lightbar and a speaker.At any given time, visitors can hear low-voltage pulsing coming from the speakers. If guests push a button, they can summon bubbles or make it rain in the habitat. The eels become more active, and their electricity increases.Scientists have long known that electric eels are indeed electric. But in the wild, they are ...read more

For most animals imprinted with spooky names, their "Boo" is much worse than their bite. Humans generally judge grotesque-looking organisms by appearance, so they conjure up nomenclature that would look right at home on the movie marquee for a "Creature Feature." But even the most menacing-looking animals with shudder-inducing names are more Treat than Trick — as long as they are treated with respect and given the space they need to thrive in their natural environment.1. Goblin Shark(Credit: 3 ...read more

The lost expedition of John Franklin is a classic tale of traveling gone wrong. When the British Royal Navy officer set out from England with two ships in 1845, their goal was to forge a way through the Arctic Ocean to open up the Northwest Passage. Unfortunately, none of the 129 men who sailed out with the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror ever returned. Reports from rescue missions, Inuit in the area and subsequent forensic and archaeological work on human and nonhuman remains have since pieced to ...read more

The Moon is anything but a lifeless rock hanging in our sky. It has pockets of water ice trapped on its surface, caves in which astronauts might one day live, and even an incredibly tenuous atmosphere known as an exosphere.That thin layer of atoms, which begins at the lunar surface and extends 100 kilometers (60 miles) into space, exists mostly because small micrometeoroids strike the surface, vaporizing atoms and lofting some into the void. That’s according to a new study published in Science ...read more

Languages are a lot like living organisms. Both evolve over time, allowing an ancestral tongue like Latin to sire diverse descendants — Spanish, French, Romanian — that are more closely related to each other than to, say, Korean. This much is old news; Charles Darwin himself noted the resemblance. “The formation of different languages and of distinct species,” he writes in The Descent of Man, “are curiously parallel.”Now, new research shows that the analogy runs deeper. Islands, long ...read more

The 2024 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, the Japan Confederation of A- and H-bomb Sufferers Organizations. Many of these witnesses have spent their lives warning of the dangers of nuclear war – but initially, much of the world didn’t want to hear it.“The fates of those who survived the infernos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were long concealed and neglected,” the Nobel committee noted in its announcement. Local groups of nuclear survivors created Nihon Hidankyo in 1956 ...read more

Rock art found in South Africa, and painted two centuries ago, represents how the San people imagined extinct animals that they found in fossil form.This early rendering of these fossils could relate to the lost cultural belief of rain ceremonies and the realm of the dead.“It’s a combination of what they could see in reality and what they imagined,” says Julien Benoit, a paleontologist at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa as he relates in a study published recently in PLOS ON ...read more

What came first, farming or our ability to digest its carbohydrate-rich harvest?A study of a gene key to breaking down carbohydrates started duplicating itself in humans over 800,000 years ago— well before the dawn of agriculture. A team of researchers report in Science that the gene, called AMY1, started creating variations of itself long before humans split from neanderthal. It plays an essential role in producing starch-digesting saliva.Ancient Dietary NeedsIn general, when genes make “co ...read more

On Oct. 14, 2024, NASA launched a robotic spacecraft named Europa Clipperto Jupiter’s moons. Clipper will reach the ice-covered Jovian moon Europa in 2030 and spend several years collecting and sending valuable data on the moon’s potential habitability back to Earth.Clipper isn’t the only mission highlighting researchers’ interest in Jupiter and its moons.On April 13, 2023, the European Space Agency launched a rocket carrying a spacecraft destined for Jupiter. The Jupiter Icy Moons Explo ...read more

The human mind may find it difficult to conceptualize a cosmic cloud so colossal it surrounds the Sun and eight planets as it extends trillions of miles into deep space.The spherical shell known as the Oort Cloud is, for all practical purposes, invisible. Its constituent particles are spread so thinly and so far from the light of any star, including the Sun, that astronomers simply cannot see the cloud, even though it envelops us like a blanket.It is also theoretical. Astronomers infer the Oort ...read more