Wildfires blazing in Siberia, as seen by one of the Sentinel 2 satellites on June 11th. (Source: Copernicus Sentinel image data processed by Pierre Markuse) I started writing this post last week after seeing the stunning satellite image above showing a blazing Siberian wildfire. When I returned to finish the post today, I learned from a story in the Siberian Times that wildfires in this part of Russia's Sakha Republic are now threatening a spectacular landscape feature known among locals ...read more

A section of limestone riddled with burrows bored by a unique rock-eating shipworm. (Credit: Shipway et al 2019, Proc. R. Soc. B 20190434. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2019.0434) What would a shipworm do if a shipworm didn't eat wood? The humble bivalve has long had outsized influence on both its environment and even the global economy. That's because, until now, every known species consumes wood, sometimes with destructive results. A shipworm species new to science, however, tunnels th ...read more

One honeybee, ah ah ah... (Credit: yod67/Shutterstock) Humans, monkeys, pigeons, fish and honeybees can all grasp the concept of a greater than or less than sign and choose between bigger or smaller quantities. Now, new research from a team led by Martin Giurfa at Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France is the first to show that honeybees, like other vertebrates, can also recognize a specific value, not just a relative value. That means they know the number 3, instead of s ...read more

Solar flares and coronal mass ejections were more common when the sun was younger, but it may still have been quieter than many other stars like it. (Credit: NASA/SDO) Stars, like humans, are more volatile when they’re young. As sunlike stars mature past their first billion years, they all tend to slow in their rotation, eventually converging to roughly the same period we see now in our sun: about 27 days for a star the same mass as our sun. But when stars are young, they rotate mor ...read more

Dogs likely evolved the gesture in response to human pressure. (Credit: Fotyma/Shutterstock) You know that look Fido gives you from underneath the dinner table? Those puppy dog eyes, researchers recently discovered, are something unique to domesticated dogs that evolved over the 30,000 or more years that we've coexisted.  In a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers used dissections and behavioral analysis to compare the facial anato ...read more

Seconds-long periods of sleep, known as "microsleep," are common during mundane tasks like driving. While these unintended brain naps can be difficult to control, getting adequate sleep is the key to preventing them. (Credit: pathdoc/Shutterstock) Have you ever spaced out during a meeting, but been jolted back to reality by the sound of your boss calling your name a few times? If you’ve ever been in this awkward situation, you might have experienced "microsleep." This weird state of ...read more

An artist’s rendering of ancient Arctic hyenas belonging to the genus Chasmaporthetes, now known to have roamed Canada's Yukon Territory. (Credit: Julius T. Csotonyi) You might associate hyenas with Africa's sprawling savannas, but the animals were once right at home above the Arctic Circle. Modern hyenas generally stick to Africa. (A decreasing number of one species, the striped hyena, can be found on the edges of southwestern Asia.) However, back in the day, various now-extinct ...read more

This is a perfect week to make and share your pollinator observations with scientists. Our editors selected five projects in need of your help. More about pollinators from Penn State's website:"Pollinators are animals (primarily insect, but sometimes avian or mammalian) that fertilize plants, resulting in the formation of seeds and the fruit surrounding seeds. Humans and other animals rely on pollinators to produce nuts and fruits that are essential components of a healthy diet." So, ...read more

In the mid-1960s, an English archaeologist discovered an enormous and ancient settlement called Çatalhöyük on the Konya Plain in south central Turkey. Wall paintings and figurines of humans and animals revealed a cultured community once lived there around 9000 years ago. Crowded houses and numerous graves revealed a growing and complex society. Researchers established the Çatalhöyük Research Project in the early 1990s to continue investigating what's thought ...read more

An artist rendered their own view of what the merging galaxies might look like. (Credit: NAOJ) Thirteen billion years ago, two galaxies collided to make something totally new. Each of those galaxies was among the universe’s first, since the cosmic clock had only been ticking for less than a billion years. As the galaxies’ dust and gas swirled together, new generations of stars were born, and their light began racing across the cosmos until it collided with the 66 radio telescopes ...read more