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

For the first archaeologists, the only way to peer inside an ancient coffin or container was to take the artifact apart. In fact, it was only through the dismantling of ancient artifacts that these individuals learned about the lives, religions and rituals of antiquity, including those of Egypt.Nowadays, there's a longer list of less invasive approaches for learning about antiquity, and that list is expanding. According to a paper published in Scientific Reports, for instance, a team of research ...read more

In his free time, David Smith designs tiles. More specifically, the retired print technician and recreational mathematician pieces together as many tiles as he can (no gaps allowed) before the pattern either repeats or cannot continue.Until recently, every shape anyone had ever tested met one of those two fates — despite the scrutiny of many brilliant minds over the past 50 years. Then, one day last November, Smith found the only known exception.13 Sided ShapeUsing an app called PolyForm Puzzl ...read more

Despite having roamed the planet millions of years ago, thanks to advances in technology, dinosaurs aren’t as inscrutable today as they once were. And over the past decades, in addition to studying what they acted like, including their habits and diets, researchers have specialized in reconstructing and depicting what they looked like — all the way down to specific details like texture and color.But how do scientists go about pinpointing these details for creatures that died 65 million years ...read more

The seizures started when Samantha Gundel was just four months old. By her first birthday, she was taking a cocktail of three different anticonvulsant medicines. A vicious cycle of recurrent pneumonia, spurred on by seizure-induced inhalation of regurgitated food, landed the young toddler in and out of the hospital near her Westchester County home in New York State.Genetic testing soon confirmed her doctors’ suspicions: Samantha, now age 4, has Dravet syndrome, an incurable form of epilepsy. H ...read more

On 1 April, the Italian government banned ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence system that generates human-like text and computer code. ChatGPT is trained on massive amounts of data scraped off the internet and the Italian authorities were concerned that this constituted a breach of privacy for those who owned the data. The ban continues as it investigates further.But this ban has had an unintended consequence. One of the big questions about ChatGPT and other so-called large language models, is h ...read more