Science

A pop-up tag on a pregnant porbeagle shark kept reporting for four days after it stopped moving like a shark — rising and falling through the water at a constant 22°C, five degrees warmer than the sea, from inside whatever had swallowed it

A pop-up tag on a pregnant porbeagle shark kept reporting for four days after it stopped moving like a shark — rising and falling through the water at a constant 22°C, five degrees warmer than the sea, from inside whatever had swallowed it

For months, the data looked like that of an ordinary shark. A pop-up satellite archive tag attached to a pregnant porbeagle shark off Cape Cod followed the animal in its usual pattern: diving deeply during the day, sometimes more than two thousand feet, and then rising back to shallower waters, roughly three hundred to two … Read more

A trail camera in British Columbia recorded a wild wolf swimming out to a buoy and hauling a fully submerged crab trap up the beach by its rope, then working the bait cup open — three minutes of footage no wild canid had ever been filmed doing

A trail camera in British Columbia recorded a wild wolf swimming out to a buoy and hauling a fully submerged crab trap up the beach by its rope, then working the bait cup open — three minutes of footage no wild canid had ever been filmed doing

The footage lasts just under three minutes. A wolf swims from a rocky shoreline on the central coast of British Columbia, grabs a floating buoy in its jaws and turns toward the beach. What he is towing is not visible from the surface: a baited crab trap, completely submerged, tied to the buoy by a … Read more

Dolphins on opposite sides of Australia, thousands of kilometres apart, appear to have independently learned to chase fish into empty seashells and tip the trapped meal into their mouths — two populations, one remarkably similar invention.

Dolphins on opposite sides of Australia, thousands of kilometres apart, appear to have independently learned to chase fish into empty seashells and tip the trapped meal into their mouths — two populations, one remarkably similar invention.

Almost 4,000 kilometers separate Shark Bay, on the west coast of Australia, from Hervey Bay, on the east coast. However, bottlenose dolphins in both places have come up with the same unusual way of catching a fish: using a large empty sea snail shell as a trap, bringing it to the surface and squeezing the … Read more

Webb found strong evidence of a Saturn-mass planet in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri A — our nearest solar twin, just 4 light-years away — then the planet seemed to disappear, sending astronomers into millions of simulated orbits to work out how it could have slipped from view.

Webb found strong evidence of a Saturn-mass planet in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri A — our nearest solar twin, just 4 light-years away — then the planet seemed to disappear, sending astronomers into millions of simulated orbits to work out how it could have slipped from view.

On a night in August 2024, the James Webb Space Telescope recorded a faint spot of mid-infrared light next to Alpha Centauri A. The source was more than 10,000 times fainter than the star and appeared about 1.5 arc seconds away, equivalent to a projected separation about twice the Earth-Sun distance. There were good reasons … Read more

5 bizarre ways space experts want to clean up Earth’s orbit

5 bizarre ways space experts want to clean up Earth’s orbit

An estimated 1.2 million pieces of debris larger than 1 cm (0.4 in) are floating in Earth’s orbit, each of which could cause serious damage if it struck functional space equipment. This problem has inspired scientists to come up with some pretty strange cleaning solutions. Sticky satellites Most space debris was not designed to be … Read more

“It’s like being shot or walking over hot coals with a rusty nail driven into your foot…” World’s 10 most agonisingly painful stings from creepy-crawlies

"It's like being shot or walking over hot coals with a rusty nail driven into your foot…" World's 10 most agonisingly painful stings from creepy-crawlies

Pain is subjective, and while most bites are a real nuisance, there are very few that can stop you in your tracks, cursing loudly and clenching your teeth, says Richard Jones. What is a sting? A sting is not just a passive blow with a sharp point; the rigid, hollow stinger (or fang) is the … Read more

Astronomers Discover the Existence of a Black Hole Star

Astronomers Discover the Existence of a Black Hole Star

When Soundgarden wrote “Black Hole Sun,” they may have inadvertently been on to something. In a new paper in Nature, scientists have recorded a “black hole star” that is the size of our solar system and glows bright red in the depths of space. The findings are based on observations from the James Webb Space … Read more