The incessant “eep, eep, eep” of hundreds of hungry flamingo chicks bounces off the concrete walls of a feeding room at the SANCCOB wildlife sanctuary in Cape Town, South Africa. Teri Grendzinski reaches into a pen and plucks out a fluffy, pale pink chick. She grips it gently with one hand. The bird opens its mouth eagerly as her syringe squirts out a kind of warm shrimp milkshake. It’s noisy, hot work. To keep the chicks warm away from their nests, their rooms are heated to a ...read more

If you could peer through the 160 miles of noxious clouds driven by hurricane-force winds over Venus, you’d witness a barren landscape strewn with volcanoes, mountains and high plateaus. Scientists have long suspected that these features formed hundreds of millions of years ago. And today, the thinking went, Venus is geologically dead. But now a cascade of new research in is forcing astronomers to reconsider that idea. Explaining Venus’ Young Surface Venus is often called Earth&rsquo ...read more

Between the third and second millennium B.C, trade networks crisscrossed the Iberian Peninsula in southwestern Europe moving amber, a rare and valuable commodity, across the continent. Now researchers say some of that amber was actually clever fakes. They suspect the counterfeit gems may have been used to swindle wealthy buyers. “This is the first time that the imitation of a very valuable material is recorded in European Prehistory,” said Carlos Odriozola, an archaeologist at ...read more

Humans have turned many wild animals into cuddlier creatures. We've domesticated wolves into dogs, boars into barnyard pigs and mountain goats into livestock that do yoga. But in addition to helpful animals and adorable pets, humans may have also domesticated an altogether different creature: Homo sapiens. The so-called self-domestication hypothesis, floated by Charles Darwin and formulated by 21st century scholars, is now popular among anthropologists. They see parallels between changes ...read more

Ah, giant pandas. Aside from their reputation for being, well, not the sharpest crayons in the box, they’re most closely associated with munching almost exclusively on bamboo. But that taste for bamboo has always stumped researchers. First off, other members of the bear family are either carnivorous or at the very least omnivorous. Plus, despite having evolved specific physical traits, like their strong jaws and pseudo-thumbs, to help them eat bamboo, pandas have what’s essentially a ...read more

In the murky darkness, blue and green blobs are dancing. Sometimes they keep decorous distances from each other, but other times they go cheek to cheek — and when that happens, other colors flare. The video, reported last year, is fuzzy and a few seconds long, but it wowed the scientists who saw it. For the first time, they were witnessing details of an early step — long unseen, just cleverly inferred — in a central event in biology: the act of turning on a gene. Those blue an ...read more

Narwhals, the unicorns of the sea, have survived for a million years with low genetic diversity — a trait that usually suggests a species is close to extinction. But a recent survey found narwhals number in the hundreds of thousands, countering the assumption that lots of gene variants within a population are necessary for survival. "There's this notion that in order to survive and be resilient to changes, you need to have high genetic diversity, but then you have this species t ...read more

In the largest-ever ancient DNA study of its kind, researchers have pieced together the history of the horse: It's an epic saga sprawling across continents and 5,000 years of evolution and domestication, and yes, it has plot twists. Among the finds: researchers uncovered two lost lineages of the animal on opposite ends of Eurasia and determined that the modern horse is very different than even its recent ancestors, thanks in part to geopolitics. The scope of the study included 278 sa ...read more

Lead water pipes have been a fixture of modern civilization for more than two thousand years.  Ancient Romans channeled water into homes and bathhouses through lead piping. In fact, the Latin word for lead, plumbum, is where we get the English word “plumbing.” Yet we have also long recognized that lead can have a serious impact on our health. Vitrivius, who lived during the first century BCE, wrote at length about the physical harm caused by lead exposure, concluding t ...read more

The European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft is on a mission to map a billion stars. But as it stares out into space, it also spies a lot of closer objects. The newly released image above shows the orbits of 14,000 asteroids that it mapped during its first two years of observing. Most of those objects were known about from previous surveys. But three objects are new, those ones are picked out in gray in Gaia’s image. The few dozen yellow tracks show asteroids that are considered near-Earth ...read more