(Credit: g-stockstudio/shutterstock) Firms in competitive industries are often seen as cutthroat and intense places to work. But while the work might be intense, the employees tend to trust and cooperate with each other, according to a study published Wednesday in Science Advances. The high stakes appear to bring about group cohesiveness, which might have deep evolutionary roots. The Canadian and American researchers examined several workplace surveys for America, such as the US Census of Firm ...read more

(Credit: Aerovista Luchtfotografie/Shutterstock) An adult albatross can spend days without ever touching the ground. Long wings that lock into place provide enormous amounts of lift. And a keen sense for thermals and air currents lets the birds soar with little energy expenditure. Sleeping, eating, drinking and bathing all take place on the wing, over the course of journeys that can span up to 10,000 miles. Entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg wish they could fly like an albatross ...read more

Scientists studied captured shipments of ivory tusks and managed to tie them to cartels. (Credit: Joe Mercier/shutterstock) Nearly 40,000 elephants die each year from illegal poaching orchestrated by large criminal organizations. The perpetrators are after ivory — the white, teeth-like material that forms the main part of elephants’ tusks. It also funds an illicit $4 billion annual industry. Now, an international team of scientists has used forensic genetics to identify three major ...read more

September 2006 MODIS image of southern California taken by the Aqua satellite. NASA Earth Observatory. The revolution in how we survey and image the surface of the Earth has had profound impacts on the geosciences. This shouldn’t be a shock to anyone as that’s what geoscientists do — study the Earth — and as we get more and better data on the planet and its surface, the better our understanding will become (and the more questions we can ask). Few technological leaps have ...read more

A new study of stars in the Milky Way reveals evidence of a cosmic near miss collision with a smaller galaxy sometime in the last billion years. (Credit: ESA) Our Milky Way galaxy holds hundreds of billions of stars. Many of those suns were formed locally from clouds of gas — at the rate of handful every year —over billions of years. But our home galaxy gets stars another way, too. It steals them. The Milky Way has cannibalized smaller galaxies throughout the eons, adding them to o ...read more

An animation of before and after images acquired by NASA’s Terra satellite shows flooding in the wake of Florence across southeastern North Carolina and northeastern South Carolina. (Source: Modified from CIMSS Satellite Blog) You’ve probably seen imagery shot in the Carolinas showing the devastating flooding that Hurricane Florence left its wake. Now, check out what that flooding looks like from space — in the before-and-after animation above of false-color satelli ...read more

Skywatchers have been enjoyed views of the Crab Nebula for nearly 1,000 years. (Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester, A. Loll (ASU)) In late spring in the year 1054, a strange light appeared in the sky in what we would now call the constellation Taurus the Bull. It was a new star, where no star had been before. It grew quickly brighter, until by July it outshone everything except the moon. Over the next two years it faded away, becoming a star of normal brightness and eventually disappearing again ent ...read more

Russia’s Zond 5 spacecraft carried two steppe tortoises on the first successful flight around the moon. The tortoises lived through their splash down in the Indian Ocean and were returned safely to Moscow, proving life could survive the trip around the moon. (Credit: S.P. Korolev RSC Energia/Courtesy of NASA) Anders. Borman. Lovell. The names of the first three humans to journey around the moon will echo throughout eternity. But these brave Apollo 8 astronauts were actually not the first ...read more