A keeper at the Oklahoma City Zoo one day noticed that Eko, a Sumatran tiger, kept rubbing his face on the side of the fence, breaking all his whiskers. A team started treating the tiger with antihistamines, but he continued to rub his face. Eventually, the staff partnered with a veterinary dermatologist who came out and performed skin allergy testing to see what Eko was reacting to. While allergies in domesticated animals like dogs, cats, horses, and some birds are common, experts say there are ...read more

Around 700 million years ago, the Earth cooled so much that scientists believe massive ice sheets encased the entire planet like a giant snowball. This global deep freeze, known as Snowball Earth, endured for tens of millions of years.Yet, miraculously, early life not only held on but thrived. When the ice melted and the ground thawed, complex multicellular life emerged, eventually leading to the life forms we recognize today.The Snowball Earth hypothesis has been largely based on evidence from ...read more

We crafted our first rodent car from a plastic cereal container. After trial and error, my colleagues and I found that rats could learn to drive forward by grasping a small wire that acted like a gas pedal. Before long, they were steering with surprising precision to reach a Froot Loop treat.As expected, rats housed in enriched environments – complete with toys, space, and companions – learned to drive faster than those in standard cages. This finding supported the idea that complex environm ...read more

Anyone following the rhetoric around artificial intelligence in recent years has heard one version or another of the claim that AI is inevitable. Common themes are that AI is already here, it is indispensable, and people who are bearish on it harm themselves.In the business world, AI advocates tell companies and workers that they will fall behind if they fail to integrate generative AI into their operations. In the sciences, AI advocates promise that AI will aid in curing hitherto intractable di ...read more

Spinning methods. (a) Manual thigh-spinning [64]; (b) Spindle-and-whorl “supported spinning” [68]; (c) “drop spinning” [66]; (d) the experimental spindles and whorls, the 3D scans of the pebbles and their negative perforations. The bottom pictures show Yonit Kristal experimenting spinning fibers with replicas of the perforated pebbles, using supported spinning and drop spinning techniques (photographed by Talia Yashuv). (Credit: Yashuv, Grosman, 2024, PLOS ONE)Perforated pebbles discover ...read more

When it comes to naturally occurring spicy foods, some animals are more fit than others to enjoy them. Humans and other mammals aren't so well equipped to handle those foods. Take the chili pepper, for example. While it's a food rich in anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties and serves as an excellent source of vitamin C, it contains capsaicin — a chemical that makes peppers taste spicy and interacts with the nerve receptor known as TRPV1. While some humans may classify the tingling and ...read more

What a slug.That line could be used as an insult for, say, a member of a sports team not expending enough effort. After all, the notoriously slow-moving mollusks are not exactly known for their hustle. But for a scientific team who found a remarkable creature, literally beyond the depths of where conventional slugs dwell, the line becomes quite a compliment.When Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) researchers sent a remotely operated submersible down 8,576 feet down off the coast of ...read more

Today, kids are expected to spend much of their day in school. Learning is divided into grades and separated by age and aptitude. But it hasn’t always been this way. Education wasn't always required, and in fact, many kids carried on the jobs their parents had instead of learning how to read and write. What and how one learned depended on one's place in society.In ancient times, much like today, education was highly valued. Subjects could range from reading and writing to philosophy and ethics ...read more

In September 1679, a French trader and explorer arrived near Green Bay, Wisconsin, with his new merchant ship, Le Griffon. The ship was loaded with furs and other commodities, and the captain was instructed to sail it back to a port in eastern Lake Erie.The trader, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, headed south in a canoe with a team of explorers. It was the last he saw of Le Griffon. The ship sank in a storm and has not been seen since.In the 345 years since the vessel sank, amateur rel ...read more

The biggest and strongest storms to hit Earth are around 1,000 miles across, with winds upwards of 200 mph. Hurricane Patricia, for example, is among the strongest ever recorded on Earth with sustained winds upwards of 215 mph, although it was reduced to a Category 4 before smashing into the coast of Mexico. But even these mega-storms are nothing compared to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot (GRS).Around the width of Earth, with winds of 400 mph, this giant system has been churning over Jupiter for hun ...read more