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

Earlier this year, a wave of human metapneumovirus — also known as HMP, or just MPV — swept across the U.S. It’s a virus that causes upper and lower respiratory tract infections, is common and often goes undiagnosed. But for most, the level of concern should be about the same as a common cold, say experts. “We do know that there are some people, as with all respiratory viruses, who should take increased precautions,” says Jennifer Schuster, a pediatric infectious diseases physician at ...read more

Javan rhinos are among Earth's rarest large mammals, and once roamed from Northeast India to Southeast Asia. Yet despite tireless conservation efforts, these hefty herbivores are now teetering on the brink of extinction.Getting a precise count of the few Javan rhinos left is critical to making decisions about their conservation. The elusive nature of these animals, however, combined with political complexities, complicate this essential task — and the clock is ticking.Of course, the Javan rhin ...read more

Knowing who to trust is part and parcel of everyday life. Instinctively we may trust one person but not fully understand why. Researchers have puzzled over this question for decades, trying to piece together what makes a person trustworthy or not. “Trustworthiness is essentially being a prosocial person,” says Sebastian Siuda, a psychologist who researches the dynamics of trust. “If somebody opens up to you and makes [themselves] vulnerable to you, you don’t use that act for your own goo ...read more

Edy Setyawan, a marine researcher in Raja Ampat, Indonesia, has spent nearly a decade researching manta rays. But he remembers one in particular: a baby that had gone “toe-to-toe” with a shark and was left with a brutal bite on its wing.The baby defended itself with its wing, Setyawan says, knowing that this is one of the few parts of its body that can recover from such an injury. The fact that even a pup knew how to survive in such a situation, he continues, is proof that these gentle giant ...read more

Ötzi the Iceman, the world’s oldest glacier mummy, was a short and slender man (an estimated 110 pounds) who had blackened lungs, presumably from sitting next to camp fires. His skin contained 61 bluish-black tattoos, which the artist may have intended as healing treatments.Researchers have learned many other details of his life because of DNA analysis, including Ötzi’s skin color and ancestry. A new such study has found that Ötzi was much balder than initially believed and had darker ski ...read more

A new discovery concerning Gale Crater mud on Mars increases the likelihood that the planet has developed some form of life in the past. This time, it’s not the composition of the mud, but its dried-out, cracked pattern of neat hexagons that matters.When mud dries, it typically forms a more squared-off pattern. But when mud dries, re-moistens, and dries again repeatedly, the pattern can shift to board-game-like hexagons.“This is the first tangible evidence we’ve seen that the ancient clima ...read more