Imagine a lush and vibrant rainforest teeming with life, with various insects crawling and flying around, and abundant aquatic fauna. This is what the now cool, temperate Central Tablelands in southwestern Australia would have looked like around 15 million years ago.This was confirmed by a spectacular recent discovery at the McGrath Flat fossil site near Gulgong in New South Wales, Australia. The site is classified as a "Lagerstätte" — a location that contains fossils of exceptional quality w ...read more
It sounded like the plot of a disaster movie: a mysterious disease in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) appeared to jump from a bat to three children who ate it. They died within two days of developing symptoms. Those symptoms included diarrhea, vomiting, and internal bleeding. Within 21 days of the first reported case, 53 people had died and more than 400 developed symptoms. People were, to put it lightly, getting worried.Scientists had initially feared this spread could represent another ...read more
Climate change is affecting the environments in which we live more and more every year. Along with that, these drastic changes are starting to take a toll on our mental health, as well, especially for young adults. An international research team has taken an interest in what kind of effects climate change is having on adolescent mental health, and the results they have uncovered are concerning. A Mental Health CrisisIn a study published in the Journal of Climate Change and Health, researchers ...read more
Mount Spurr, just to the west of the city of Anchorage, is rumbling. The Alaska Volcano Observatory has been monitoring the earthquakes, gas emissions and visible changes at Spurr and think we might be headed towards a new eruption, the volcano's first since the early 1990s. They've placed it at Yellow Alert status thanks to all the unrest since the start of 2025.More potentially active volcanoes are located in Alaska than any other state in the US thanks to the long chain of the Aleutians that ...read more
Birds-of-paradise are among the most resplendent creatures on Earth, with long, elaborate feathers in eye-popping shades of yellow, blue, and red. Naturalists have admired them for centuries. Yet it turns out they didn’t know the half of it.As if those vibrant colors weren’t enough, a recent study found that the birds — native to Australia, Indonesia, and New Guinea — are also biofluorescent. Their skin and plumage absorb light at high-energy wavelengths, then re-emit it at low-energy wa ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine