The song “Little Fluffy Clouds” was a breakout hit during the dawn of techno music. Turns out, it may also be an apt description of stellar nurseries — the birthplace of stars.These nurseries contain high concentrations of gas and dust and are also called molecular clouds. A study now provides evidence that some stars may have been born from some fluffy versions of these clouds in the early years of our universe, they report in The Astrophysical Journal.“Even today our understanding of s ...read more

Humans are obsessed with staying clean. We bathe or shower regularly (at least most of us do). We trim our hair and nails. Some people even pay for other people to groom them when it comes to pedicures or facials. Hygiene isn’t just a modern fad. It’s an instinct that humans evolved for well before bathtubs, loofahs, and shampoo. Archaeological evidence suggests humans began combing, plucking, and cutting their hair at least 3,000 years ago. While bathing and grooming is an innate part of be ...read more

Every dog owner recognizes the telltale manners of their furry companion, from tail wags to perked-up ears, but another, more subtle behavior likely won’t be caught at first glance: blinking. A dog’s blinking may not seem like a noteworthy function, but a recent study has found that it could actually reflect a subconscious way that dogs socialize, opening scientists’ eyes to a new perspective on canine communication.The research, published in Royal Society Open Science, shows how dogs mimi ...read more

A new fossil discovery may rewrite Australia’s Cretaceous Period evolutionary history. Paleontologists led by Museums Victoria Research Institute and Monash University uncovered what they believe is the oldest known megaraptorid and possibly the first known evidence of carcharodontosaurs from Australia’s Victoria Coast. According to the study published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, these findings could change what science has known about predatory hierarchy in Cretaceous Austra ...read more

Scientists using the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) have completed two major tasks. They’ve compiled the largest ever sample of dwarf galaxies (systems contain up to a mere several billion stars, compared to the Milky Way’s estimated 2 billion to 400 billion) that host an actively feeding black hole. They’ve also recorded the largest collection of potential intermediate-mass black holes so far.Both results are reported in The Astrophysical Journal and provide new insight into ...read more

It was a slaughter. By 2007, a family of pumas likely killed thousands of Magellanic penguins (MP), over the course of several nesting seasons along the wild coastline of Argentine Patagonia.A group of scientists scoured the Monte León National Park crime scene, collected information, and have now presented some theories about the root causes of this seabird mass murder. They have also named some unwitting co-conspirators behind the killings: humans, according to an article in the Journal for N ...read more

Although almost everyone dreams for a large part of the night, not everyone can recall their dreams in the morning. Some people wake up and consistently remember their dreams in vivid detail — including complex storylines, dialogue, and locations — while others have no dream memory whatsoever.Scientists from the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca in Italy set out to investigate the factors influencing dream recall. They published their findings in Communications Psychology to contribute t ...read more

Susan Hough, a seismologist at the United States Geological Survey (USGS), was scouring archives for information about a 7.3-magnitude earthquake that struck Charleston, South Carolina, in 1886. Her search brought her to a bookstore where she encountered Haunted Summerville, a collection of eerie tales from a small town just north of Charleston.“It was the sort of thing you stash in the back of your mind,” Hough says. At first, she didn’t give it much thought. But near Halloween, when the ...read more

When it comes to animals with incredible memories, fish typically don’t come to mind, in fact, it's quite the opposite. Even the poor goldfish has been accused of only having a 10-second memory, though science has proved that false. However, a new study published in Biology Letters found that not only do certain fish have a great memory, but they’re also able to tell people apart. Could Fish Recognize Humans?While doing research for a different study, divers in a research station in the Me ...read more

The weather inside our Solar System is tough to track. But even tougher to track is the weather outside our Solar System. Implementing all four of the telescope units of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), a team of researchers has observed the weather on WASP-121b, or Tylos, an exoplanet around 900 light-years away, identifying the layers of its atmosphere for the first time. Reporting their results in a study in Nature, the team identified three layers of churning ...read more