What’s black, white and always dressed to impress? A penguin! And scientists, with the help of drones and poop stains, recently discovered a mega-colony of these dapper animals. The Adélie penguin population in the Antarctic continues to decline, particularly on the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula, which some studies link to climate change. However, little is known about the population residing on the east side of the continent. After analyzing old satellite images, researcher ...read more

Returning sight to those for whom it's slipped away has been a goal of scientists for decades. But repairing or replacing the delicate internal machinery of the human eye has proven difficult so far. A few experimental devices have managed to grant low-resolution sight to the blind, but most require the use of bulky electronics and external power sources. But researchers from Fudan University and the University of Science and Technology of China say that they've come up with a more elegan ...read more

Chile’s Atacama is Earth’s driest desert. You could sit for decades in some places and never feel a raindrop. And yet, life survives here. Well-adapted plants can catch Pacific Ocean fog; then they provide that hydration to other animals. Indeed, our planet’s atmosphere holds more water than all its rivers combined, and these organisms are tapping into this water supply that humans are only beginning to appreciate. It’s not just in fog and clouds either. The air itsel ...read more

When I first saw this beautiful remote sensing image, I couldn't help but feel that I was looking at a painting by an abstract expressionist. Starting in the 1940s, abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollack and Clyfford Still "valued spontaneity and improvisation, and they accorded the highest importance to process," writes Stella Paul of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These artists placed "an emphasis on dynamic, energetic gesture," she notes. Their works also were p ...read more

Fight the flu, monitor mouth microbes, and prepare for Citizen Science Day! Flu Near You How are you feeling? If you can answer that question, you can answer a very quick weekly survey to tell researchers if you're feeling sick or not. This effort helps inform scientists on where the flu is around the world, check out the results on the map to see if the flu is, in fact, near you! Get started! Location: Online Only ...read more

Is it better to be lucky or good? Well, it's a trick question — you actually need both if you want to be successful. In an admittedly simplistic model, researchers from Italy's University of Catania, looked at whether talented individuals or those blessed with luck rose to the top. Though they found it took a bit of both, the distribution wasn't even. The most successful people weren't the most talented — they were simply the luckiest. Keep That Rabbit's Foot Their work was inspired ...read more

Thanks in large measure to warming temperatures, the average snowpack in U.S. western states has dropped by 15 to 30 percent since 1915. The water in that lost snowpack is comparable in volume to Lake Mead. With a maximum capacity of 9.3 trillion gallons, Mead is the West’s largest manmade reservoir. The new data on snowpack declines are among the striking results of a study led by Philip Mote, director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute at Oreg ...read more

"Salami slicing" refers to the practice of breaking scientific studies down into small chunks and publishing each part as a seperate paper. Given that scientists are judged in large part by the number of peer-reviewed papers they produce, it's easy to understand the temptation to engage in salami publication. It's officialy discouraged, but it's still very common to see researchers writing perhaps 3 or 4 papers based on a single project that could, realistically, have been one big paper. ...read more

When solving a crime, detectives don’t always have access to footage or photographs of their suspect. Instead, the detectives have to painstakingly search for small, easily overlooked clues — such as fingerprints. Like detectives, astronomers don’t always have the option of simply examining an image when they want to solve a mystery. Instead, astronomers usually must meticulously piece together tiny bits of evidence, often by scouring the heavens to hunt for clues. And one of ...read more

Bro, what even is a species? I've been writing about various species for a while now, and this latest Attenborough is really throwing me for a loop. It's a kind of small bird from the Amazon called a gnatcatcher. They're a kind of small songbird related to wrens, and they feast on insects with small, sharp beaks—in between warbling out their songs, I imagine. And it's most likely a new species. But the researchers in charge of deciding weren't all that sure. Because we don't ha ...read more