Imagine you're a leech in one of the lush rainforests of Southeast Asia (or Madagascar or mainland Africa) that you call home. Perhaps you're clinging to the underbelly of a low-lying plant or burrowed just below the surface in a patch of damp soil. Then, dozens of human tourists start marching through the terrain, providing countless opportunities for you and your companions to suction yourselves onto their boots, or drop down from the trees above. Surely, for the leeches, large groups of human ...read more

Snow leopards are so rare that many of the researchers who have studied them for decades have never even seen one in the flesh. These big cats may leave scat or even the occasional tuft of fur in a hair snare, but their passage is often ghostly — so much, in fact, that photographers are only just now capturing many aspects of their lives. In many areas, snow leopards still face conservation threats due to mining development, livestock herding and persecution from locals in their range.Snow Leo ...read more

In 1346, Tartar leader Khan Janibeg laid siege to a Genoese city in Crimea called Kaffa in hopes of removing the Italians from this central foothold. What happened next has become part-legend, part-historical record: As the Tartars waited outside Kaffa’s walls, the soldiers began to fall one by one to a terrible disease, the plague.Out of frustration, the Tartar leaders catapulted the disease-ridden bodies over the walls of the city, where the residents threw the bodies aside and fled in ships ...read more

Unless you’re Peter Pan, you can’t lose your shadow. At least, not permanently. Shadows crop up wherever light is obstructed by an object, and they come in a range of shapes and sizes. In 2012, for example, physicists captured the first-ever view of an atomic shadow by shining a laser at a single ytterbium atom in a vacuum chamber. And on a much larger scale, our moon blocks the light of the Sun from reaching Earth during solar eclipses. Millions of people will witness this firsthand in 20 ...read more

The United States is a volcanic country. Sure, a large swath of it east of the Rocky Mountains haven’t had an eruptions of tens to hundreds of millions years, but the western US, Alaska and Hawai’i are all full of active or potentially active volcanoes. This got me wondering what are the biggest eruptions the US has experienced and that led me down a rabbit hole considering what that question actually means. So, I present you with the largest eruptions in the US over the last 10,000 years. A ...read more

If there’s one thing that paleoanthropology has revealed time and again, it’s that many renditions of ancient human species preceded us modern humans today.While Neanderthals and even Homo erectus have become fixtures in the human origin story, a lesser-known predecessor appears to predate all the others: Homo habilis.H. habilis has been called the oldest known member within the Homo genus, though not without controversy and ongoing debate.By many scientists’ accounts, the species was like ...read more

Dwarf stars invisible to the naked eye could be hiding a wealth of exoplanets that contain liquid water and suitable conditions for life, according to a new study. The faint red stars make up some 58 of the 100-plus billion stars in the Milky Way, so the new findings greatly expand the prospects for planet hunting.Scientists already knew that red dwarfs hosted planets, but the new study estimates what percentage of their planets orbit in a way that preserves liquid water and chances for life.Wha ...read more

With their big eyes and bulbous bodies, frogs are the most adorable of the amphibians. But frogs are also a whole lot more than adorable, being among the most diverse animals in the world. While some spend their time in the trees, others settle in the sand. While some are small, others are substantial. And while some blend into their surroundings, others demand to be seen. Here are a few froggy facts, and a few of the cutest frogs found around the world today.Types of FrogsRepresenting over 7,60 ...read more

These days, the term “Y2K” is mostly associated with a recurring fashion trend. But a couple of decades ago, it was an ominous abbreviation that emerged in the media — and in the worst nightmares of those who experienced it — for a completely different reason.Y2K was shorthand for a potential doomsday scenario that envisioned the downfall of global power grids, the wiping out of financial assets at banks and businesses and the general obliteration of the computer systems upon which moder ...read more

On April 5, 1909, a newspaper called the Arizona Gazette published an article on the front page of its evening edition. The story, “Explorations in the Grand Canyon,” was filled with wild claims that remnants of an Egyptian civilization had been discovered within a massive cave in the Grand Canyon’s cliffs. Perched 2,000 feet above the Colorado River, the chambers of this “underground citadel” were littered with artifacts, hieroglyphics and even mummified remains, possibly of Egyptian ...read more