Cats are tough cookies to crack. Unlike most dogs, who excitedly run over when you call their names, cats can be pretty dismissive. After being snubbed by my cat for the hundredth time, I start to wonder if she listens to me or even knows her name. Well, new science says that the answer is yes. Research published today in the journal Nature suggests that domesticated cats do, in fact, know and recognize their names. A team of researchers studied how 78 different cats responded to ...read more

To protect Chinese emperor Qin Shihuang in the afterlife, thousands of clay soldiers joined him underground some 2200 years ago. The discovery of this Terracotta Army in the 1970s was a great gift to archaeologists — and fans of "ancient lost technology" stories. The trope, which has some basis in fact, suggests that our ancestors were privy to some knowledge or technology that would still be useful, but has since been lost to the ages. When researchers discovered that this buried, a ...read more

Humanity may soon get its first-ever picture of a black hole. Scientists with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) announced this week that they'll be holding a press conference Wednesday, April 10, and they're expected to reveal the results of their years-long quest to catch a black hole on camera. What that picture will look like is still unknown. But scientists think they have a pretty good idea of what a black hole should look like. For years, astronomers have been running simul ...read more

Many facial moisturizers brag about their sun protection abilities. But new research shows that user error is stopping SPF-containing moisturizer from providing much of a defense against the sun’s harmful rays. Researchers found that people miss more of their faces when putting on moisturizer than they do when applying sunscreen. The findings mean we need to pay more attention to better protect against skin cancer. And, when it’s really sunny out, sunscreen might be the be ...read more

Wisdom teeth seem like a biological mishap. Our third and final set of molars to grow, wisdom teeth don’t quite fit in many people’s mouths, leading to millions of surgeries per year. But in some people, these "extra" teeth come in just fine, while others don't have them at all. What’s the biological story here? First let’s establish what’s probably not the story: Conventional wisdom about wisdom teeth assumes evolution was doing away with these unnecessary chompe ...read more

Tall undulating seaweed known as kelp grows in thick underwater forests off the southern coasts of Africa. The kelp forests were once thought to provide a safe haven to Cape fur seals from great white sharks. Then researchers put GoPro-like high-resolution cameras on the predators. Instead of being deterred by the underwater flora, the sharks dive right into thick kelp forests in pursuit of prey, the researchers find. It's a new discovery for shark researchers, who had previously thought ...read more

(Inside Science) -- In the battle of the sexes, sexually transmitted diseases may sometimes be a weapon that males use to win. That’s the conclusion of a new study that used mathematics to model an age-old evolutionary struggle: the quest to fill the next generation with as many of your offspring as possible. The findings probably don't apply to humans, and the outcome would vary depending on the animals and diseases involved, said the researchers. But by infecting a female with an STD, a ...read more

Underwater archaeologists excavating Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, South America, have been uncovering artifacts like this bowl. The finds offer clues to a long-vanished culture. Recently, a group working on Khoa Reef at the lake have uncovered a number of ritual offerings, including ceramic puma shaped incense burners, the remains of sacrificial llamas, and ornaments made of shell, gold and stone. The reef is located near the Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun), an important religious site ...read more

No, you can’t actually take a picture of a black hole. But astronomers have promised to do the next best thing: To image the seething chaos just outside the black hole, known as its event horizon. To capture this region, just on the cusp of the black hole itself, astronomers have had to link telescopes from across the globe and focus them on the closest, most massive black holes known: Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”), which resides at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy ...read more

Astronomers have been grappling with the mystery of dark matter for a long time, and I mean a looong time. The history of dark-matter investigations goes back at least to 1906, when physicist Henri Poincaré's 1906 speculated about the amount of “matière obscure” in the Milky Way. Or really, it goes to back to 1846 and the first successful detection of dark matter: the discovery of the planet Neptune, whose existence had been inferred by its gravitational pull well befor ...read more