We’ve all occasionally wished that our pets could speak, but their mouths, tongues and vocal cords just aren’t built for it. However, cats do sometimes use their tongues to communicate with us; they just employ a form of nonverbal communication — licking. This simple act sends a message that we, being only human, may not always understand — or appreciate.Anyone who has ever been licked by a cat knows to expect one thing: the sudden sensation of a patch of skin being lightly sanded — ov ...read more

A study led by researchers at the University of Maine spearheaded a new approach to finding where ticks love to lurk. The Maine Forest Tick Survey trained hundreds of woodland owners in Maine to systematically comb their properties for disease-toting ticks to discern how forest management may influence the pest’s prevalence.Ticks pose a growing public health burden. Lyme disease, which can be transmitted by deer ticks, is the second most common infectious disease reported in Maine. Each year, ...read more

Imagine someone chopping vegetables on a cutting board. No, really. Before reading on, take a moment to truly visualize the scene as vividly as possible.Try as you might, odds are your mental image will omit some basic features. Was the picture thorough enough to specify the size of the knife or the material of the cutting board? The kind of vegetables? The person’s gender? The color of their hair and clothes?A recent study published in Cognition found that most people respond “yes” to som ...read more

Many birds survived the extinction of the dinosaurs, but not all. Some went extinct along with the non-avian dinosaurs, and scientists aren’t sure why. When an asteroid hit the Earth, tossing up dust into the sky, why did some winged creatures survive while others fell by the wayside?A pair of new studies, based in part on the discovery of ancient baby bird feathers preserved in amber, suggest that a major factor lies in how the different bird groups molted.Two Different Types of Baby BirdFeat ...read more

Sharks inhabit every ocean around the globe, and despite most people not living near the ocean, many have likely heard of great white sharks and tiger sharks. While these well-known sharks are major predators, they tend to stay in shallower waters. There are some sharks, however, that swim so deep in the ocean that people know little about these predators. In recent years, technology has helped scientists better understand deep-sea sharks. Learn more about them here with these four sharks tha ...read more

It's a quiet and cold night in the Moroccan Sahara, with temperatures dipping into the 40s. This isn't the romantic image of the desert you might imagine — no mile-high dunes, soft sands or dromedaries traversing the landscape. Here, the desert is stony and flat with hard-packed gravel, dotted with periodic dry bushes and the occasional sheep herder. Far from any water sources, this part of the world may not see rain for several years.Surviving in these harsh environments is a small, unassum ...read more

Apart from Tyrannosaurus Rex, no other group of dinosaurs has captured popular imagination like the Dromaeosaurs. Fast-moving and potentially fast-thinking, these dinosaurs grew feathers and often appeared more birdlike than many of their contemporaries.Nicknamed the “raptors,” perhaps the most well-known Dromaeosaur is the Velociraptor.How Big Were Velociraptors?Much of this dinosaur’s fame comes thanks to the Jurassic Park movies, which featured large beasts referred to as Velociraptors. ...read more

In 2021, a team of archaeologists led by the University College of London (UCL) Institute of Archaeology dug deep trenches into the gravelly soil of a site southeast of London. Their routine job was to check the land before workers built the Maritime Academy secondary school, but the work became more and more exciting as they excavated.From the 3-meter-deep trenches, they collected some 800 different stone artifacts thought to be over 300,000 years old – so old that they couldn’t say for sur ...read more

Hidden in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, a new species of crocodile newt remained undetected on the forest floor — until now. The new species, dubbed, Tylototriton ngoclinhensis, has an oval-shaped head that appears dipped in florescent orange paint, then stippled with 14 warty dots on each side of its back."It is an exceptional discovery as it is one of the most colorful species in the genus Tylototriton. This is also the first time biologists recorded a crocodile newt species from the C ...read more

In a world where information is always at our fingertips, it can be baffling that misinformation continues to run rampant. With scientific facts so easily accessible, it should be simple to set the record straight.However, scientific research has confirmed: Facts alone aren’t always enough to correct misinformation and change people's minds.Unfortunately, the way our brains store information isn’t always conducive to correction. On top of that, we aren’t as rational as we like to think we ...read more