New fossil find Vulcanops hails from New Zealand, home of burrowing bats including the now-extinct Mystacina robusta, shown here in an artist rendering. (Credit Gavin Mouldey)
Where might you expect to find fossils of a giant burrowing bat, three times bigger than today’s average bat? Why, in St. Bathans, New Zealand, of course. Vulcanops jennyworthyae, which lived more than 15 million years ago, tells a fascinating story of a lost world.
No offense to Jenny Worthy, the team member h ...read more
Motherly love. (Credit: Shutterstock)
Years ago, we believed that we weren’t animals and that animals were here solely for our use. Indeed, a cow was just a walking burger, a Sunday roast, keeping itself fresh and tasty ready for when we were hungry.
Luckily, for their sake, things have progressed significantly from then and now we recognize that animals (including our “superior” human selves in that category) can experience emotions from more simple ones such as happiness and ...read more
Norishige Kanai (right) pictured with fellow astronauts Mark Vande Hei of NASA (left) and Alexander Misurkin of Roscosmos (center). (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
A Japanese astronaut grew three and a half inches during the course of his trip to the International Space Station.
If that sounds too incredible to be true, you’re right. It’s not. But some people evidently believed Japanese astronaut Norishige Kanai when he tweeted out a mistaken measurement from aboard the ISS M ...read more
(Credit: Shutterstock)
Robots are finding new ways to get under our skin, and that’s a good thing.
Lab-grown organs are carving their place in medicine, as scientists can today grow miniature brains, kidneys and more in the lab to conduct research or even treat patients. In fact, in 2011, doctors successfully transplanted the first lab-grown organ—a trachea— into a cancer patient who needed theirs removed. But growing custom organs from a patient’s stem cells is ne ...read more
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are one of the few truly mysterious phenomena in the universe. Astronomers first noticed the milliseconds-long intense pulses of radio waves in 2006, and we’ve slowly but steadily been learning more about the extragalactic signals ever since.
We still don’t really know exactly what they are, but thanks to a study published Wednesday in Nature (in fact it’s the cover story), we’re finally starting to understand these strange signals.
Do the Twist
...read more
This is a living representative of a primitive Glossata, moths that have a proboscid that suck up fluids like nectar. (Credit: Hossein Rajaei)
Think of some scaly animals.
Odds are butterflies didn’t come to mind. But butterflies and moths have scales on their wings, legs and bodies. Thanks to those scales, researchers have found the oldest known fossils of butterflies and moths, both in the order Lepidoptera, according to a paper published Wednesday in Science Advances.
While the Le ...read more
(Credit: David Stuart Productions/Shutterstock)
On a freezing morning in January, my boyfriend had just emerged from the icy waters of Lake Michigan along with hundreds of others who had just participated in the annual Polar Plunge. He was frozen to the bone, but so was everyone else. There was, however, something distinct about my boyfriend’s experience — the extreme cold triggered a new, mysterious allergy that would linger for years.
That summer, he took a dive into a cool lake ...read more
Research shows slow but steady increases in astronauts’ core body temperatures during their time at the ISS. (Credit: NASA/STS-130 Crew)
A great amount of time and effort is spent ensuring the mental and physical well-being of astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS), and new research shows that increased body temperature is another factor to consider when evaluating astronauts’ health.
In the study, published January 5 in the journal Scientific R ...read more
A bird of paradise spreads it feathers as it engages in a mating dance. (Credit: BBC/Youtube)
Vantablack has been called the world’s darkest substance. When it was unveiled in 2014, the material made headlines for the way it seemed to leach objects of their three-dimensionality; it was so black that every feature merged into a black hole.
Darker than a black bear in a cave on a starless night, Vantablack looks downright otherworldly. But, humans are hardly alone when it comes to ink ...read more
