Tackling a migration enigma, scientists are getting a grip on where these slithery fishes call home.
Johannes Schmidt spent 25 years chasing an enigmatic fish across the Atlantic Ocean. The Danish biologist surrendered the hunt only after his ship was torn to pieces on a Caribbean coral reef. Schmidt was trying to solve an ancient mystery about one of nature’s strangest fish: eels. Aristotle suggested the slithering species emerged spontaneously from the earth. But by the early 1900s, ...read more
The Inka Empire ruled millions without a written language. Keeping records was a knotty situation.
High in the Peruvian Andes, in the remote village of San Juan de Collata, sits a wooden box that’s sacred to the locals who keep close guard over it. It contains 487 cords of twisted and dyed animal fibers that, according to its caretakers, encode messages planning an 18th-century rebellion. Anthropologist Sabine Hyland was invited by community members to study the strings — the fi ...read more
(Credit: John Carnemolla/Shutterstock)
If you want to get something done in an African wild dog pack, you’ve got to be ready to sneeze.
The animals seem to make group decisions based on a system of explosive exhalations — “sneezes” — that determine if they get up and go on the hunt. If the dogs reach a quorum of sorts, they all fall in line — no “bless you’s” necessary.
Sneeze If You’re With Me
Researchers from Swansea University and ...read more
Closeup look at Hurricane Irma’s eye, acquired by the GOES-16 weather satellite. (Source: RAMMB/CIRA)
As I’m writing this on Wednesday morning, the eye of Hurricane Irma — a “potentially catastrophic” Category 5 storm – has passed over the islands of Barbuda, Saint Barthelemy and Saint Martin, and was shortly headed for the Virgin Islands.
I shudder to think what has been happening on the ground with the storm’s maximum sustained win ...read more
Photo: flickr/Kevin Dooley
There are many ways to cope with being blind, from using a cane to adopting a seeing-eye dog. But some blind people have gone a step further and developed the skill of using mouth clicks to echolocate, in the same way that bats navigate in the dark. Here, a group of engineers studied exactly how these ‘human bats’ — or ‘bat men’, if you will — echolocate. They found that the clicks are very short (~3 milliseconds) and the freq ...read more
Zika virus (green) preferentially targets the stem cells (red) in a human glioblastoma. (Credit: Zhu et al., 2017)
Zika has largely faded from the news cycle as efforts to control the disease have taken hold and the number of new cases has dropped. Now, it’s back, not as a pending epidemic, but as a potential treatment for brain cancer.
Researchers from the Washington University School of Medicine and the University of California, Santa Barbara have conducted preliminary tests with the v ...read more
The Grasburg Mine in Indonesia. The pit itself is 4-km and sits near the top of Pancake Jaya. Small glaciers can be seen to the right of the mine. NASA Earth Observatory.
Who owns the land beneath your feet? That might seem like a simple question, but what about the stuff beneath the surface? The rocks and minerals … and resources? Who owns those items of potential value and who gets the profits if that resource is exploited? These questions have existed for centuries and are still being ...read more
Smoke from the fires appears to have blown all the way across North America and more than half way across the Atlantic
Smoke and heat from raging wildfires in Idaho and Montana are seen in this animation of satellite images acquired on Sept. 3, 2017. (Source: RAMMB/CIRA)
As of this afternoon, 77 large fires are burning across 1.4 million acres in eight western U.S. states. That’s an area more than three times the size of Houston.
The burning is part of a long-term trend of incr ...read more
Dating of Neanderthals gone awry? Remains of our hominin cousins previously found in Croatia’s Vindija Cave return to the spotlight with new research that claims earlier studies got their age very wrong. (Credit Ivor Karavani)
With every new find, our understanding of the twilight of the Neanderthals, our nearest hominin kin, advances. Or not.
New research on some of the most famous Neanderthal fossils, from Croatia’s Vindija Cave, suggest earlier analysis about their age ...read more
