Half a billion years ago, in the earliest days of animal life, there were few undersea predators. A strange shrimp-like creature that grew up to 6 feet in length and wielded twin claws served as top predator. Meanwhile, small chaetognath worms snapped at prey with a mouth that bristled with spines.But these sparse ranks have just gotten a little less sparse.A new fossil discovery has confirmed that a much more familiar predator, a type of jellyfish, also stalked the oceans more than 500 million ...read more

Living on the same planet that we evolved on, it can be easy to take things for granted. We have an abundance of fuel and fresh water, plants and animals for food, and an atmosphere with plenty of oxygen.Yet we also have plans to send people off-world. In the coming decades, humans will set out to explore our solar system in greater detail than ever before; we have plans to erect a base on the moon through NASA’s Artemis mission, and even send the first people to Mars.Is There Oxygen in Space? ...read more

It was the first epoch after the age of dinosaurs in a part of the world that had recently recovered from an asteroid blast of epic magnitudes. The blast birthed the tropical rainforests along the equator that exist today. A landscape that was damp and swampy, covered in dense tropical foliage — ample places for Titanaboa to hide.What Was the Largest Snake in the World?Titanaboa, the largest snake in the world, lived during the Paleocene around 58 to 60 million years ago. It thrived alongsid ...read more

A predatory species of fish has adapted to the destruction of its local coral reef by using another fish, the peace-loving parrotfish, for cover, according to a new study.Researchers and local divers in the Caribbean have long talked about the tactic and painted a similar picture: The long, thin trumpetfish swims alongside the more rounded parrotfish (or another reef fish) as if seeking cover from it. But does this really help the trumpetfish to hunt?To find out, the researchers from the univers ...read more

Are we alone in the universe? There are good reasons to suspect that we have company.After all, the universe is exceptionally large, with possibly billions of Earth-like planets in our Milky Way galaxy, which is but one of trillions of galaxies in the universe.The ingredients for life, as far as we know, are common. And humans on Earth have proven life is capable of evolving to a point of technological complexity which could make our presence visible to anyone out there looking.But could we reco ...read more

The release of Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s sprawling study of the man known as “the father of the atomic bomb,” has propelled the world-shifting work of a scientist to cinema’s front stage. Tracking the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer through his time as director of the Manhattan Project and beyond, the film explores the complexities of its protagonist’s character and conscience alongside the thorny union of science and morality.5 Movies About ScientistsIf that tangled, three-hour ...read more

Titanosaurs, a diverse group of long-necked sauropod dinosaurs, were found on every continent, including Antarctica, in their Cretaceous heyday. They lived right up until the end of all other non-bird dinosaurs, when the Chicxulub asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula about 66 million years ago.Paleontologists have discovered dozens of distinct titanosaurs, many of them relatively recently in fossil beds in South America. Nearly all of the group are massive, but like other sauropods, these giant ...read more

Science has long accepted that people are affected by their social environment – a term researchers use to describe day-to-day surroundings, interactions and stresses. For example, people with money, a robust social life and access to safe outdoor spaces are often going to have better long-term health outcomes than those without. Our four-legged friends, whose lives in many ways mirror our own, are also thought to be influenced by their social environment. But the specifics of how and why have ...read more

The divine blend of spices needed to make curry first reached Southeast Asia about 2,000 years ago, when the region began trading with the Indian subcontinent, according to an analysis of ancient spice residue.The new project analyzed 12 different spice grinding tools unearthed at the ancient trading port of Oc Eo, in modern-day Vietnam, by washing them with water and chemicals. This produced hundreds of tiny fragments that the researchers painstakingly identified (to a reasonable degree of cert ...read more

King Charles III, who assumed the throne of the United Kingdom in 2022 upon the death of Queen Elizabeth II, has a reputation as an environmental activist. What's more, some political commentators see his reign as an opportunity to enact the large-scale change needed to fight global warming. When he first entered public life at age 20, the then-Prince of Wales used his celebrity to sound the alarm. “Conservation or problems about pollution should not be held up as separate concepts from housin ...read more