Researchers excavate insect fossils from a rich dig site called the Karamay outcrop in China. (Credit: Daran Zheng)
Around 250 million years ago, a massive extinction event known as the “Great Dying” wiped out nearly every organism on Earth. Scientists know plants and animals bounced back a few million years later and exploded in diversity, but what about insects? These days they’re the most diverse group of organisms on Earth with estimates of as many as 30 million species.
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Saturn’s hexagon swirling at the planet’s north pole.(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Hampton University)
Above Saturn’s north pole, clouds swirl in a distinct and stunning hexagonal shape. Discovered by NASA’s Voyager mission in 1981, Saturn’s hexagon is striking to behold, and one new study suggests that this six-sided vortex may actually be hundreds of kilometers tall.
After the Voyager mission pushed human exploration far out into the solar system and, subsequent ...read more
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to extract natural gas, pumps water into the ground. That water can cause earthquakes. (Credit: Jens Lambert/shutterstock)
A version of this article originally appeared on The Conversation.
Earthquakes in the central and eastern United States have increased dramatically in the last decade as a result of human activities. Enhanced oil recovery techniques, including dewatering and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, have made accessible large quantities of oil a ...read more
A section of the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline. Someday, similar pipelines could also carry carbon for storage. (Credit: Kyle T Perry/Shutterstock)
Capturing carbon emissions and locking them away deep underground could be a viable means of beginning to combat climate change. But, the industry needs a little help, researchers find.
While taking carbon directly from the air and sequestering it in rocks is far from a feasible scenario, capturing it at the source — power plants and refiner ...read more
Bonnethead sharks dine on seagrass, in addition to a steady diet of marine creatures. (Credit: Jiri Prochazka/shutterstock)
Sharks are infamous meat-eaters. The ocean’s buffet of fish, crabs, mussels, shrimp and krill fill the legendary predators’ stomachs and give them sustenance. Now researchers have discovered that one particular species, bonnethead sharks, also dine on seagrass to meet their nutritional needs. The discovery means bonnethead sharks are not carnivores but omnivor ...read more
The need to digitize “dark data” — fossils and other unstudied material sitting in archives around the world — takes on new urgency in light of a devastating fire at Brazil’s Museu Nacional, or National Museum. Here, in a 2015 photo, the museum in better times. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Odair Bernardo)
As curators begin the grim work of sorting through what’s left of Brazil’s fire-ravaged National Museum, a new paper quantifies the stagg ...read more
An expanding shell of dust and gas is blown outward, away from a star’s dense, white-dwarf core in this artist’s illustration. (Credit: NASA/ESA/STSCI/G. Bacon)
Let us sympathize, for a moment, with neutrino researchers. These tireless folks devote their energies toward understanding subatomic particles that, it would appear, want nothing to do with them. Neutrinos, born from supernovas and other cosmic events, flit through the universe unaffected by almost all of it, harmlessly pa ...read more
The moss Funaria hygrometrica can absorb an impressive amount of lead thanks to a special kind of acid contained in its cell walls. (Credit: USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab)
Want cleaner drinking water, free of toxins and contaminants? Mother Nature’s here to help.
A number of studies have come out over the past year looking at the role different plants could play in remediation, i.e. the removal of dangerous substances. This green technology is known as phytoremediation, from the ...read more
While in “profound rest,” bees’ antennae gradually droop down and slowly sway back and forth, a 1988 study of bees found.(Credit: C. HELFRICH-FÖRSTER / AR ENTOMOLOGY 2018 (MODIFIED FROM Walter Kaiser / Journal of Comparative Physiology A 1988))
If you watch an exhausted baby carefully, you may be able to see gravity tug heavy eyelids down. Likewise, a sleeping honeybee’s usually perky antennae droop (as illustrated here, the top row shows various views of a ho ...read more
People become less approving of social media outrage the more people join in with it. One person rebuking another is fine, but ten people doing it looks like a mob.
This is the key finding of an interesting new paper called The Paradox of Viral Outrage, from Takuya Sawaoka and Benoît Monin of Stanford.
According to the authors, the titular ‘paradox’ is that “individual outrage that would be praised in isolation is more likely to be viewed as bullying when echoed online by ...read more
