What is Tulum known for? Well, anyone who’s ever heard of the place knows it as a buzzy resort, the trendier alternative to Cancun (80 miles to the north), and for the past few decades an increasingly popular (and crowded) destination for foodies, influencers and tourists in general.But the ancient Maya people were at Tulum long before it was cool. In fact, skeletal remains found in nearby cenotes and underwater cave systems indicate that the area was populated by Indigenous people 10,000 or m ...read more

Several years ago, Christian Rutz started to wonder whether he was giving his crows enough credit. Rutz, a biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and his team were capturing wild New Caledonian crows and challenging them with puzzles made from natural materials before releasing them again. In one test, birds faced a log drilled with holes that contained hidden food, and could get the food out by bending a plant stem into a hook. If a bird didn’t try within 90 minutes, the res ...read more

Before area codes were introduced to the public in 1951, there were 10 million possible ways for the seven digits of a phone number to be arranged. This would have become a problem for telephone owners eventually; New York City alone had a population of almost 7.9 million that same year.Yet with the rollout of three additional digits at the front of every phone number, suddenly the total number of possible combinations jumped from 10 million to a whopping 10 billion. Crisis averted, right?Maybe ...read more

Curtis Berlinguette was a preteen when he first heard of cold fusion. The concept involves the generation of nuclear energy at room temperature, rather than heat similar to the searing core of the sun.“My dad read about it in a magazine and said it was going to change the world,” Berlinguette recalls.That seemed like a reasonable conclusion. Cold Fusion EnergyIn the spring of 1989, two electrochemists claimed they’d fused hydrogen atoms into helium under laboratory conditions. If humankind ...read more

A typical wolf pack comprises of a breeding pair and their offspring, including both young and mature wolves that haven’t yet set out on their own. Wolf Pack MeaningA wolf pack is essentially a family, says Doug Smith, a wildlife biologist who headed the program to reintroduce wolves to Yellowstone and launched the Yellowstone Wolf Project, an initiative that, over the years, has produced an extensive body of research on wolves.Despite common images of wolves as ruthless and vicious, wolf f ...read more

Aside from their appearance in the historical records of the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians, the Nabataeans didn’t keep historical documents of their own. This leaves much of their history and culture open to creative interpretation — including their origins. The NabataeansWhat we do know is that the Nabataeans were a civilization of tent-dwelling nomads who amassed great wealth as merchants. The first accounts of the Nabataeans show that they lived as traders, porters, and nomads in the deser ...read more

Our planet holds a lot of trash. Since the Industrial Revolution, we humans have produced 30 trillion tons of stuff – from skyscrapers and bridges to clothes and plastic bags. Much of it is still with us in the form of waste.Globally, people add 350 million tons to this total every day. What’s worse, much of the world’s garbage is mismanaged – dumped on land, in waterways and in open dumps in cities and towns. This exposes people to serious health risks. It harms plants and soil ...read more

Robots that look like humans have long been a science fiction staple. As a storytelling device, it’s easy to grasp their appeal. Whether it’s the replicants from Ridley Scott’s cyberpunk thriller Blade Runner or the expressive android Ava in Ex Machina, these lifelike constructs allow us to explore questions about gender, technology and what it means to be human. For nearly a century — and arguably before — roboticists have been working to make that fiction a reality. And there’s no ...read more

If you were to meet a velociraptor, you wouldn’t be confronted with the tall, sleek and lizard-skinned beast from the hit Jurassic Park franchise. Instead, you would likely face off against a much smaller, feathery and colorful creature.  Over the last few decades, scientists have learned a lot about what dinosaurs looked like — and that’s changing long-held beliefs. Did Dinosaurs Have Feathers?One of the biggest recent changes, says Paul Barrett, a researcher with the Natural History Mu ...read more

ChatGPT and similar large language models can produce compelling, humanlike answers to an endless array of questions – from queries about the best Italian restaurant in town to explaining competing theories about the nature of evil.The technology’s uncanny writing ability has surfaced some old questions – until recently relegated to the realm of science fiction – about the possibility of machines becoming conscious, self-aware or sentient.In 2022, a Google engineer declared, after inte ...read more