Scientists have discovered smaller dogs aim higher, most likely to appear larger. Photo Credit: Mike Finkelstein
You know how people say you should aim high? Well, small male dogs have taken that advice to heart. A new study has found that they lift their legs higher when urinating than larger dogs, apparently attempting to appear bigger than they are.
Dog walkers know that walking a male dog is an exercise in patience, as they want to pause to sniff, lift, and dribble a little urine ...read more
Cruise ship employees, part of a “polar bear guard” unit, shot this bear after it got close to them. Experts say such encounters are happening more often. (Credit: Gustav Busch Arntsen/Governor of Svalbard)
Workers were still fast asleep in their orange tents at Greenland’s Summit Station when the polar bear neared camp. An early riser spotted the bear and shouted to alert campers, sending people to the safety of a hard-sided building nearby.
As the bear scoured the research ...read more
Voyager (left) launched in 1977; New Horizons (right) launched in 2006. The two missions have a curiously interconnected past.(Credit: NASA/JPL; NASA)
While many people know about the Voyager missions launched in the 1970s and the New Horizons probe that visited Pluto in 2015, few are aware that the relationship between these two missions dates back to the 1960s. Had scientific goals been different at the time, Voyager might have taken the place of New Horizons, decades before the latter was e ...read more
SIMP J01365663+0933473, shown here in this artist’s concept, is a massive, nearby exoplanet with a powerful, aurora-generating magnetic field.(Credit: Caltech/Chuck Carter; NRAO/AUI/NSF)
A bizarre rogue planet without a star is roaming the Milky Way just 20 light-years from the Sun. And according to a recently published study in The Astrophysical Journal, this strange, nomadic world has an incredibly powerful magnetic field that is some 4 million times stronger than Earth’s. Furthe ...read more
According to the 1950s, we should have jet packs and flying cars by now. Another lost transportation method from yesteryear: jet shoes. In the 1960s, NASA engineers built jet shoes for astronauts, which, in the revised history of everyone’s dreams, could have eventually trickled down to a consumer version.
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Jet shoes emerged because engineers and mission planners really didn’t know what kinds of challenges astronauts would be facing in on spacewalks. They just knew ...read more
A soft robotic device powered by popcorn, constructed by researchers in Cornell’s Collective Embodied Intelligence Lab. (Credit: Cornell University)
Robots have always been cool and futuristic. Since we live in such ultra-modern times we’re seeing more and more of them, whether it’s to clean our floors, drive our cars or even give us extra limbs. But usually the focus is on what robots can now do, and less on what actually powers their abilities.
Not today: A team of Cornell ...read more
(Credit: Ivan Marjanovic/Shutterstock)
If the quintessential ecological battle cry of the seventies was “Save The Whales,” today it is “Save The Bees.” From news headlines to environmental campaigns to alarming documentaries, we’re warned that if the bees go extinct, we’ll go with them.
It makes sense — about 75 percent of crops are reliant on animal pollinators, which are often honeybees. Without them, the theory goes, we’d not only lose $212 bi ...read more
(Credit: Hayk_Shalunts/shutterstock)
Zebra finch males sing just one song their entire lives. It’s a tune to woo females and keep away other males. Now scientists find they may have a way to reconstruct the songs these birds sing in their dreams.
Birds sing by using muscles to vibrate air. Prior work suggested that each of the different muscles that play a part in bird song just controlled one acoustic feature of singing. However, recent work hinted that each muscle could play more ...read more
(Credit: Neil Bromhall/Shutterstock)
In colonies of naked mole rats—wrinkly, pink-skinned rodents with oversized front teeth that live in extensive underground tunnel systems—one special couple gets to reproduce, creating the entire next generation for the colony.
For most mammals, breeding comes at a heavy cost — reproduction shortens lifespans. But for naked mole rats, procreating appears to slow aging, the exact opposite of whatâ ...read more
The view of the main plaza at Tikal. (Credit: WitR/Shutterstock)
Though today it is a wilderness, in the time of the Maya, the Central American lowlands they called home would have looked far different. Where emerald jungle canopies roll for miles on end, cities, roads, reservoirs and terraced fields would have covered the hilly landscape in southern Mexico, Guatemala and Belize.
Millions of people called this land home, members of a loose alliance of interconnected city-states. The Maya devel ...read more
