After choking New York City and other major metropolises on the U.S. East Coast a few weeks ago, wildfire smoke from Canadian wildfires is now blanketing the Midwest — and streaming all the way across the Atlantic to Europe. I got a first-hand look at the smoke while flying in and out of Chicago yesterday (June 27), where some of the worst air pollution levels among major world cities were recorded. (As was the case for Minneapolis and Detroit too.) Here’s a photo I took of the pall just aft ...read more

The term schizoid is used colloquially and often facetiously to mean something like “being of two minds about something” or “appearing to have more than one personality.” In psychiatry, however, the term is quite specific, and it definitely does not apply to your sister, who can’t make up her mind about where to go for lunch. The term is short for a condition known as “schizoid personality disorder.” But forget how we use schizoid; in some cases, disorder may not even be the rig ...read more

Gentoo penguins are the speediest swimming birds in the world. Thanks to their slick wings, the birds can reach speeds of up to 22 mph while searching for food. Now, because of a new study published in Physics of Fluids, researchers understand the mechanism behind their exceptional swimming ability and found that it’s all in the angle of their wings.By observing how penguins move and position their flippers underwater, researchers can use the findings to design aquatic vehicles without high ex ...read more

For thousands of years now, mammals have held dominion over the land. But it wasn’t always this way. According to a new paper, early mammals evolved before a massive asteroid hit the planet 66 million years ago and therefore lived briefly in the shadow of the dinosaurs.These hard-scrabble animals included the earliest relatives of humans, dogs, rabbits, cats and any mammal that gives birth with a placenta. They survived until an asteroid marked the end of the Cretaceous Period and the reign of ...read more

In North America, skinks are often tiny, slick and snakelike — with shiny blue tails or bright red heads. Nearly all of them can fit in the palm of your hand. But more than 47,000 years ago, an armored tank of a skink walked the desert lands of Australia.“It was nicknamed ‘megachunk’ or ‘chunksaurus,’” due to the thickness of its bones, says Kailah Thorn, a paleontologist at the Western Australia Museum who recently described the species for the first time. “It’s a pretty heavy ...read more

If you ask a kindergarten class to draw a rhinoceros, you’ll probably get an amusing variety of artistic renditions. One feature, however, will likely remain constant: a majestic horn adorning its head, defining the rhino's distinct silhouette.Yet, in the wild, this iconic horn is disappearing – faster than rhinos in some cases.In the ongoing battle to protect endangered rhino populations from poaching, conservationists employ a controversial practice known as “dehorning.” This process r ...read more

In 2017, Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian National Museum, pointed a magnifying lens at a 1.45 million-year-old tibia and saw a series of neat slashes. The bone belonged to the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi, where Pobiner had gone to look for animal tooth marks on ancient hominin bones. While researchers generally assume that animals killed and ate our ancient ancestors, relatively little evidence has ever come to light.But this was a different kind of evidence, as ...read more

If you took our whole planet and ground it up into a powder, then analysed that powder for its elemental composition, what would you find? A third of the powder would be iron, another third would be oxygen. Of the remaining ~35%, 30% of it is magnesium and silicon. Most people would guess that maybe elements like carbon or hydrogen would be next on the list ... but they'd be wrong. The element that ends up at #5 on the list is sulfur. Now, this exercise of thinking of a "bulk Earth" shows how bi ...read more

Pterosaurs, which means winged lizard in Greek, are often referred to as flying dinosaurs, but they aren't actually dinosaurs. They're an extinct group of flying reptiles that ruled the skies starting 225 million years ago. Still, they're more closely related to birds and dinosaurs than they are modern reptiles. And they were also the first vertebrae to leave land and take to the skies.The Evolution of Pterosaurs(Credit: Akkharat Jarusilawong/Shutterstock)The earliest pterosaurs were smaller ...read more

The ocean is unfathomably deep.To try to fathom it, picture trekking from sea level to the top of the world’s tallest peak, Mount Everest. If it was inverted above the Mariana Trench, the submerged tip would come more than a mile short of the seafloor. This deepest region known in our seas — a crescent-shaped canyon near Guam and the Mariana Islands — is located in the western Pacific Ocean. How Deep Is the Mariana Trench?Some measurements in the Mariana Trench have charted depths exceedi ...read more