Our planet still can't seem to beat the heat.Last month was the warmest August on record. "Sweltering" was the word used by the normally staid National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to sum up the findings of its regular monthly analysis. And August wasn't just a one-off. By NASA's independent calculation, last month caps the hottest summer in the Northern Hemisphere since global record-keeping began in the 1800s. It also extends our planet's heat streak to 15 straight months of record s ...read more

Life and death are traditionally viewed as opposites. But the emergence of new multicellular life-forms from the cells of a dead organism introduces a “third state” that lies beyond the traditional boundaries of life and death.Usually, scientists consider death to be the irreversible halt of functioning of an organism as a whole. However, practices such as organ donation highlight how organs, tissues and cells can continue to function even after an organism’s demise. This resilience raises ...read more

If you haven’t given it much thought, you probably think non-human animals see the world the same way we do. The truth is the world looks very different to most other animals than it does to us.And this discrepancy between how non-human animals see the world and how we do can be a problem for wildlife biologists. To address this, Daniel Hanley, biologist at George Mason University and his team published their results in PLOS Biology on a new recording system that could help better capture how ...read more

Contemporary coelacanths are often described as living fossils. Superficially, that may be true. But new evidence now makes that nickname less valid. The two species of the large-boned lungfish alive today don’t look that much different than the first known coelacanth fossil dating back over 410 million years ago. But two new fossils show that the species did evolve — albeit slowly and subtly. Also, scientists for the first time link evolution to tectonic activity, according to a report in N ...read more

What parent hasn’t been there? It’s been a long day, you still have dinner to make, maybe lunches for tomorrow too, and you just don’t have the energy to wrangle your kids into a new art project or plead with them to pick up a book.Instead, you give in when they beg for more iPad time. Or maybe they promise they’ll do their homework after just a few more YouTube videos, and it’s easier to agree than have another argument. Now you’re not only exhausted, you feel like a bad parent too. ...read more

Boeing’s crew transport space capsule, the Starliner, returned to Earth without its two-person crew right after midnight Eastern time on Sept. 7, 2024. Its remotely piloted return marked the end of a fraught test flight to the International Space Station which left two astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams, on the station for months longer than intended after thruster failures led NASA to deem the capsule unsafe to pilot back.Wilmore and Williams will stay on the Internation ...read more

Large language models like ChatGPT are revolutionizing the way people write. But that creates a problem for scientists. These models are trained on human knowledge that already exists, whereas science is generally concerned with new findings that extend this body of knowledge. So scientific papers can contain information that an LLM will never have seen. That means asking one of these machines to write a scientific paper raises important questions about whether it can write accurate statements ...read more

When a flock of crows began antagonizing an owl in my neighborhood, we could hear the commotion from blocks away. It was late morning, a time when owls typically sleep.Dozens of crows swarmed the owl as it moved from a tree branch to a rooftop to a fence post. The owl seemed old and was missing an eye, and at times it seemed as though it was bracing itself when the crows darted close.The crows antagonizing the owl were exhibiting mobbing behavior. In the past 50 years, more scientists have becom ...read more

What happens to a dead body in an extremely cold environment? Does it decompose? How do these conditions affect how forensic scientists understand when the person died?Estimating time of death, also called the post-mortem interval, is a complex task. It plays an important role in forensic investigations, as it can provide critical insights into the timeline of events leading up to a person’s death. This information can narrow down potential scenarios and suspects, aiding in the resolution of c ...read more

Is the adage “calories in, calories out” true? The short answer is yes, but the full story is more nuanced.From the moment food touches your tongue to the time it leaves your body, your digestive system and gut microbiome work to extract its nutrients. Enzymes in your mouth, stomach and small intestine break down food for absorption, while microbes in your large intestine digest the leftovers.“Calories in, calories out” refers to the concept that weight change is determined by the balanc ...read more