Researching intelligence is an extremely difficult task, even in animals alive today. In part that’s because much of the scientific jury is still out on what intelligence even is. So, estimating the smarts of any creature that is now extinct is an especially tall order. In the case of dinosaurs, combine the fact that they have been gone for tens of millions of years, and this task requires … even more brains, and speculation.Nevertheless, scholars have pursued several different methods to t ...read more

One of the most active volcanoes on Earth is Russia's Sheveluch. Over the past few decades, it has produced dozens of explosive eruptions while also building a new lava dome in the vacated remains of an even larger eruption and collapse. However, when it comes to volcano's like Sheveluch, all that work to create the dome can be ruined in a moment. A massive blast earlier in April looks to have eviscerated the Shiveluch's lava dome.The dome (see above and below) had been growing off and on since ...read more

Finland has been rated the happiest country in the world for six years straight. And many other Northern European countries like Sweden, Iceland, Denmark and Norway are also highly ranked. But the Finnish people wouldn't necessarily claim they were happy; they would say they were content — more satisfied with their lot in life.Contentment is less common in the U.S., where striving for the American dream makes us one of the most ambitious countries on Earth. So is all this striving impacting ou ...read more

The Milky Way dominates the night sky. It appears as a hazy band of light that stretches from one horizon to the other. But this side-on view hides the galaxy’s structure and prevents astronomers deciphering the shape of our home galaxy.Nevertheless, astronomers currently believe that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy consisting of a central bulge or bar with four main spiral arms and several others branching away. Now Ye Xu at the Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing, China, and colleagues, ...read more

It’s likely you’ve heard of malaria, HIV-AIDs and tuberculosis. These three diseases continue to have a massive impact on human health across the globe. You may not be familiar, however, with schistosomiasis, Chagas disease, leishmaniasis or trachoma, which fall under the umbrella of “neglected tropical diseases” (or NTDs for short).What Are Neglected Tropical Diseases?NTDs comprise a range of illnesses mostly caused by viruses, fungi, bacteria and parasites. Together, these include at l ...read more

How plants communicate has long been a question up for debate.In fact, it was initially very controversial: Books like “The Secret Life of Plants” (1973) seemingly undermined the credibility of some of the first studies in the field by suggesting that plants thrive if you, say, sing or play classical music.While many of those statements were later debunked, researchers remain adamant that there is some sort of communication going on between plants — and between plants and animals.Can Plant ...read more

As the animations below dramatically illustrate, it really has been boom year for snow in the western United States. That's especially so for water-starved California, as well as the megadrought-afflicted Colorado River Basin, whose dwindling waters support a $1.4 trillion economy.Before-and-after satellite images, one captured on April 8, 2022 by the NOAA-20 satellite, and the other on April 10, 2023 by the Suomi-NPP spacecraft, show a dramatic difference in snowpack in the mountains of the Ame ...read more

For Akito Kawahara and his colleagues, a few shots of mezcal were well deserved after a long day of catching butterflies in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula four years ago. But just because booze was on the table didn’t mean the work was over.Kawahara remembers someone mentioning that a bottle of mezcal at the bar contained one of the infamous tequila worms. When the team asked the bartender for the worm for further inspection, “he thought we were crazy,” says Kawahara, a lepidopterist (a pers ...read more

When it comes to fighting climate change, the more ideas, the better. While these creative solutions may at first seem rash, if there were ever a time to welcome creative and even crazy ideas, now would be it. Here are a few of the most surprising ideas scientists have thought of to combat climate change. 1. Mechanical Trees[embedded content]What do you do when you don’t have real trees? You plant fake ones, of course. Klaus Lackner, a professor of engineering, has invented a mechanical tree ...read more

Whenever images of giant ash plume show up in the news, one of the first questions that arrives in my inbox is whether that eruption will impact the Earth's climate. It turns out that it takes more than just an ash column that towers 100,000 feet (30 kilometers) over the volcano to drive the needle when it comes to our planet's climate. What might be the most important factor for an eruption to impact climate?First, a few volcano-climate basics. It isn't the ash that causes Earth's climate to ch ...read more