Superstition is all around us in today’s world, whether it’s the fear of walking under a ladder or encountering a black cat late at night. Many of these quirks and common practices that people follow unquestioningly are steeped in history, dating back hundreds and sometimes thousands of years to ancient times. So what are the origins of some common superstitions and their historical roots?  1. Conniving Crows(Credit: Stephen John Edwards/Shutterstock) Immortalized in today’s culture and ...read more

The human age we live in has impacted nearly all life on our planet. Some of the worst of these effects are the extinctions and extirpations of an untold number of species over the past few thousand years at an accelerating rate. The most recent wave of extinction has led some scientists to call our period the Anthropocene Extinction, along with the Sixth Mass Extinction. In the past, the giant Chicxulub impactor caused the end of the non-avian dinosaurs and many other lifeforms 66 million years ...read more

As cute as they are, baby otters are also highly demanding, and moms carry the load. Mother otters teach pups how to groom themselves, to forage for tasty morsels like shellfish, to crack them open with a rock, to dive and even to swim. Baby otters hang around their moms for as long as eight to 11 months, compared to the mere four to six weeks that sea lions spend in their mothers’ care.But what happens when juvenile white sharks attack female otters, mistaking them for blubbery pinnipeds? Or ...read more

The most disturbing thing about exploding head syndrome is when it hits you. Just in the process of drifting off to sleep, people suddenly think they hear a piercing, crashing noise.“It’s usually very short, very loud — like a gunshot or explosion,” says Dan Denis, a psychologist with the University of York in the U.K. “It can be pretty scary.”Many people have experienced this once in their life, and a smaller subset reported recurrent episodes, sometimes as much as once per month. E ...read more

On November 24, 1974, Donald Johanson and Tom Gray were riding in a Land Rover on the hunt for bones. It was hot and dry, and the two were tired from a long day of excavating fossils. As they coasted through a dusty gully, having taken a different route than normal, Johanson spotted the forearm bone of a hominid poking out from beneath the dirt.Uncovering the ulna would lead to 47 other bones, including a skull bone, femur, ribs, pelvis, and the lower jaw, all of them belonging to a young adult ...read more

New fossils provide the missing links between smaller, earlier flying reptiles and the later massive pterosaurs. Initial pterosaurs had wingspans of about 6 feet, while later species measured as much as 32 feet across. Paleontologists describe the fossil of the new species, Skiphosoura bavarica, in a Current Biology report.Splitting Flying ReptilesAlthough Skiphosoura appears to be about the same size as early pterosaurs, it holds some important anatomical differences. Paleontologists had long s ...read more

Many times, the volcanoes that have eruptions that last decades are ones like Kīlauea in Hawai'i, Yasur in Vanuatu or Erebus in Antarctica, where hot, runny basalt continuously erupts in lava lakes. However, when you look at the Global Volcanism Program's list of current eruptions, a few more explosive volcanoes jump out -- in particular, Shiveluch in eastern Russia. Two MODIS images taken by NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites. The top is on November 7, 2024 prior to a large explosive eruption. T ...read more

On the last day of September 2024, the Fat Bear Week contest was set to begin. But two brown bears were caught in a deadly struggle that was live streamed across the world. The two bruins bobbed up and down on the Brooks River on the Alaskan peninsula, splashing, tussling, and snapping their jaws at one another. The male bear, 469, drowned the female bear, 402, and took bites from her body. Researchers say that, while killing and cannibalism are normal parts of bear behavior, it’s impossible t ...read more

In the spring of 1846, a caravan of pioneers left Independence, Missouri, and began the long trek toward California. The group mostly comprised of families who hoped to start a better life out West. The pioneers initially followed the Oregon Trail until Wyoming. Relying on advice from a guidebook, they took what promised to be a shortcut. But the new route was longer than expected and trapped them in the Sierra Nevada mountains over the winter.“By the time they got back on the established tri ...read more

With the U.N.'s COP29 climate conference underway in Baku, Azerbaijan, a flurry of unsettling news about global heating has emerged. The summit — attended by diplomats from nearly 200 nations, and nearly 60,000 people in total — is intended to be a forum for discussion and adoption of solutions. But this year it's being roiled by even more controversy than usual. Meanwhile, with recent findings showing no easing of our climatic plight, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is preparing to take p ...read more