A rare, nearly complete fossil of an extinct North American porcupine helped me and my colleagues solve a decades-long debate about how the modern North American porcupine evolved from its ancestors.Published in Current Biology, our paper argues that North American porcupine ancestors may well date back 10 million years, but they wouldn’t be recognizable until about 8 million years later.By comparing the bone structure of porcupines across North America and South America, we determined that fo ...read more

It has been over 10 months since the on-again, off-again eruption near Grindavík in Iceland began. Since then, multiple eruptions have tapped a source of magma at the base of the crust under the island nation. That magma made its way to the surface to eruption as spectacular lava fountains and flows that have covered a significant area of real estate near the small fishing village and Blue Lagoon hydrothermal area.Thankfully, there has been only one death from a worker falling into a crack whil ...read more

In a world so thoroughly reshaped by human hands, animals often bump into novel ecological conditions — problems evolution didn’t prepare them for. Plastic items look like food, but they’re indigestible; artificial lights look like stars, but they’re useless in navigation; dead logs look like prime real estate, but they’re often bound for the woodchipper. Natural selection couldn’t foresee all these deadly new surprises, known as “evolutionary traps,” and thus, animals lack the b ...read more

Just like people confronted with a sea of options at the grocery store, bees foraging in meadows encounter many different flowers at once. They must decide which ones to visit for food, but it isn’t always a straightforward choice.Flowers offer two types of food: nectar and pollen, which can vary in important ways. Nectar, for instance, can fluctuate in concentration, volume, refill rate, and accessibility. It also contains secondary metabolites, such as caffeine and nicotine, which can be eit ...read more

What is the first thing you do in the morning after you awaken? Many people immediately check their phones for notifications of messages, alerts and social media updates by their social ties.Ninety-seven percent of U.S. adults report owning a cellphone, with 90% reporting that they own a smartphone.While some researchers and media outlets portray phone use as detrimental, the reality is that the effects of technology use, including phones, vary depending on multiple factors. These include the am ...read more

Hurricane Helene has been rampaging through the southeastern United States today, causing catastrophic flooding and killing at least 40 people in four states. The death toll is likely to rise.The storm slammed ashore as a Category 4 hurricane on Thursday evening with maximum sustained winds of 140 mph. It also pushed up inundating storm surges. As I'm writing this on Friday afternoon, it has been downgraded to a tropical storm — but it still poses deadly dangers. "Historic, catastrophic and li ...read more

Archeologists have discovered what may be a missing link between agriculture that grew ancient civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia and more recent ones in the Mediterranean. Excavations in a northwestern African area known as the Maghreb reveal farming practices similar to those that sprouted civilizations on the Nile River and the Tigris and Euphrates. They also show evidence of trade that tracks how human developments expanded northward, according to a report in Antiquity.Spreading Civiliza ...read more

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