Science
562 articles
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Why Dumping River Sand Into Lakes Is Actually Saving Ecosystems
We spend billions moving dirt around rivers just to keep commercial barges from running aground. Most of that dredged material gets treated like trash or dumped in a random pile out of sight. But the
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What Most People Get Wrong About Life Limits And The Fire Amoeba
We've spent decades assuming complex life hits a hard thermal brick wall at 60 degrees Celsius. Turns out, biology doesn't care about our arbitrary textbook ceilings. Researchers at Syracuse
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What Your Science Textbook Got Wrong About T Rex Body Temperature
For decades, scientists pictured the Tyrannosaurus rex as a sluggish, cold-blooded lizard that spent its mornings baking in the prehistoric sun. That entire mental image is wrong. New geochemical
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What Ancient Dna From Xinjiang Tombs Tells Us About Yellow River Farmers
History has a funny way of completely rewriting itself the second we actually check the genetic data. For generations, archaeologists stared at the sprawling Bronze Age cemeteries tucked away in
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Why That New Moon Crater Changes Everything About Building Artemis Bases
A six-story building slammed into the lunar near side in May 2024. Nobody on Earth noticed. No ground telescope flashed red. No space-weather monitor blinked. It took until August 2025 for human
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Why Your Body Temperature Is Surprisingly Close To A T. Rex
You share a lot more with a ferocious prehistoric apex predator than you probably think. For decades, scientists argued endlessly about whether dinosaurs baked in the sun like giant lizards or burned
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Why Carbon Dioxide Mats Are Changing How We Fight Invasive Zebra Mussels
Zebra mussels are small, but their destruction is massive. Once these stubborn invaders show up in a freshwater system, they blanket lakebeds, choke out native species, and clog industrial
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Why Mosquitoes In Iceland Change Everything We Know About Arctic Survival
For centuries, travelers traded stories about paradise-like destinations without annoying biting pests. Iceland sat proudly at the top of that short list. You could hike through lush valleys, camp
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How A Random Rock In Montana Turned Out To Be 66 Million Year Old Dinosaur Dung Holding The Best Fossilized Feather Ever Found
Sometimes the most groundbreaking discoveries in paleontology don't come from dramatic cliffside excavations or multi-million dollar digs. They happen because someone looked down at an unassuming
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How Hawaii Saved A Extinct-in-the-wild Coral From Disappearing Forever
Back in 2015, marine biologists made a desperate gamble in Kaneohe Bay. They pulled tiny fragments of a knobby finger coral variant—found nowhere else on Earth—off a dying reef on Oahu. Good thing
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Why Finding Adult T Rex Footprints In North Dakota Changes Everything We Know About Their Movement
Bones tell you what a creature looked like when it died, but footprints show you how it lived. For decades, paleontologists have stared at mountains of fossilized skeletons belonging to Tyrannosaurus
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How Worms And Bacteria Smashed Marine Science Timelines In The South China Sea
We used to think nature took its sweet time repairing the deep ocean floor. Traditional marine biology models assumed that when a massive methane seep opens up, building a functioning microbial
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Why Taylor Swift Now Has An Entire Genus Of Australian Bugs Named After Her
Pop culture and hard-core biology just collided in a big way. A team at the University of California, Riverside, officially named a brand-new insect genus Swiftiephylus after Taylor Swift. If you're
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What Ancient Teeth Tell Us About Our Long History With Drugs
We like to think modern vices are purely modern inventions. They aren't. Long before anyone bottled beer or packaged pharmaceuticals, our ancestors were actively experimenting with mind-altering
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Why Ancient Indonesian Foragers Chewing Mind Altering Nuts Changes Everything We Know About Prehistoric Drug Use
You probably think humanity's earliest flirtation with psychoactive substances started around the dawn of agriculture with fermented barley beer. Think again. Archaeological finds on the Indonesian
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What Most People Get Wrong About Costa Rica's New Ghost Shark Discovery
Far below the surface of Costa Rica's Pacific coast, where sunlight dies out completely and the pressure is enough to crush a submarine, strange fish sat in museum drawers for years. Everyone ignored
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How The Klamath River Salmon Came Back Faster Than Anyone Expected
For over a century, four massive concrete walls choked the life out of the Klamath River. They blocked migration routes, warmed the water into a soup of algae and disease, and cut off tribal
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Why Over 100 Eagle Rays Swarm Malta Tuna Farms And What It Means For Marine Life
Picture diving into the Mediterranean and finding yourself surrounded by more than a hundred massive, winged rays gliding silently through the blue. It sounds like a scene straight out of a wildlife
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Why Scientists Are Swapping Plastic For Sheep Wool On Swiss Glaciers
High above the resort town of Les Diablerets, a patch of the Tsanfleuron Glacier has spent the summer wearing an unusual blanket. Instead of the standard white plastic tarps that ski resorts
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Why William Beal And His Century Old Buried Seeds Still Matter
In the fall of 1879, a botanist named William James Beal walked out onto a sandy knoll at what was then the Michigan Agricultural College. He carried 20 glass pint bottles filled with sand and weed
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Why The Shaggy Sea Hare Deserves Way More Attention Than A Quick Nat Geo Clip
You see a soggy moss-covered meatball on the seabed. You look closer. It has bunny ears, blue-ringed eyespots, and a bad rug. Meet Bursatella leachii, the shaggy sea hare. National Geographic drops
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Why These Seven Countries Will Actually Survive A Global Collapse
Civilizations don't usually vanish overnight. They grind down slowly through a mix of resource depletion, economic shocks, and compounding environmental stressors until the machinery of daily life
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Why That 324 Million Year Old Texas Fossil Changes Everything We Know About How Insects Invaded Land
For decades, text books taught a clean and simple story. Ancient aquatic creatures grew wings, crawled out of the water, and conquered dry land in a swift, triumphant evolutionary sprint. Fossils
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Why Utah Is Hiding Millions Of Cubic Metres Of Ice Under Plain Sight
Hike up Mount Timpanogos in Utah's Wasatch Range, and you will step over miles of jagged gray rubble. It looks like an ordinary, lifeless pile of shattered rock. You wouldn't expect to find a massive
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How Scientists Are Finding Lost Australian Frogs Using Only Creek Water
You don't need to spot an animal to know it is still hanging on. For decades, conservationists tramped through the muddy, leech-infested rainforests of Queensland, Australia, straining their ears for
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What Happened When Nasa Sent 3300 Bees Into Space
In April 1984, the Space Shuttle Challenger carried a very unusual payload into orbit. Tucked away alongside high-profile satellite repairs, roughly 3,300 honeybees and a single queen blasted off on
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How Sharks Use Earths Magnetic Field Like An Internal Gps
Imagine swimming thousands of miles across open water without a single road sign, landmark, or digital screen to guide you, then returning to the exact same coastal nursery year after year. For
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What The Apollo 15 Green Glass Beads Taught Us About A Wet Moon
Back in July 1971, Apollo 15 astronauts David Scott and James Irwin spotted something entirely unexpected against the monotonous grey dust of the lunar surface: tiny, vibrant green flecks. James
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Why Asia's Hidden Water Crisis Is Way Worse Than Melting Glaciers
Everybody worries about shrinking glaciers. You see the photos, read the alarming headlines, and assume the ice disappearing from mountain peaks is the entire story. It is not. Look beneath the
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Why Idaho Had To Wage An Underwater War To Save Its Fisheries
In the early 2000s, Lake Pend Oreille was dying. The trophy trout that defined the region were vanishing. The kokanee salmon—the absolute backbone of the lake's entire food web—had been pushed to the
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Why Thinking Humans Are The Only Species To Keep Pets Is Just Wrong
You probably grew up thinking that human beings possess a monopoly on the concept of pet ownership. It’s a nice idea. It makes us feel special, sophisticated, and uniquely kind. But the biological
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Why Cheap Picnic Coolers Are Saving Endangered Coral Reefs
You don't need a multi-million-dollar laboratory to fight climate change. Sometimes, you just need a trip to the local hardware store for a cheap Styrofoam or plastic picnic cooler. Marine
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How Fur Traders Accidentally Turned Alaskan Grasslands Into Tundra
You wouldn't think that a small, fluffy predator could rewrite the geography of an entire archipelago. Yet, that is precisely what happened across Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Back in the late 19th and
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Why Thousands Of Hidden Alaskan Earthquakes Just Rewrote Plate Tectonics
Ground doesn't usually break in straight lines by accident. Beneath the jagged peaks of the Alaska Range, an invisible geological puzzle sat completely ignored for decades until computer algorithms
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Why Your Kitchen Colander Is Actually The Best Solar Eclipse Viewer You Own
You don't need fancy equipment to watch a solar eclipse safely. Honestly, most people waste money on expensive glasses or complicated setups when a simple kitchen tool beats them all. When the
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Why Fixing The Deepwater Horizon Coral Disaster Took Sixteen Years
You cannot simply slap a band-aid on the bottom of the ocean. When the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in April 2010, millions of gallons of oil didn't just foul beaches. A massive share of that crude
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Stop Staring At The Sun And Other Crucial Solar Eclipse Safety Rules
Staring directly at a solar eclipse will fry your retinas. People still do it anyway. Every time a major celestial event rolls around, eye hospitals brace for a wave of patients who ignored basic
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Why A Solar Eclipse Is Still Our Best Window Into The Universe
Look up at the wrong time during a total solar eclipse and you'll burn your retinas. Look up at the right time and you'll witness the single most humbling spectacle nature offers. Most people treat
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Why Eradicating Prairie Dogs Was A Massive Ecological Mistake
For over a century, ranchers and government agencies treated black-tailed prairie dogs as public enemies. People shot them, gassed them, and poisoned them across millions of acres from southern
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Why Florida Saving Its Clams Changes Everything You Know About Marine Restoration
You could once walk down to Florida's Indian River Lagoon, step into the water, and scoop up hard shell clams by the bucketful. It was an angler's paradise. The water stayed remarkably clear because
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Why Costa Rica's Tiny Coffee Frog Changes How We Look At Farmland Wildlife
You won't find this creature in a pristine, untouched rainforest. Instead, you have to look right into the rows of a working agricultural plot. Costa Rica's newly recognized coffee frog,
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Why August Skies Are Delivering A Double Feature You Can Not Afford To Miss
Look up next week. You are about to witness one of the best celestial lineups in years, featuring a daytime solar eclipse crashing head-on into the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. Most people
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The Final Edge Where Mercury Vs Sun Plays Out In Silence
The steel casing of the probe ticked as it cooled in the vacuum, a faint, rhythmic pinging sound that nobody on Earth would ever hear. Inside the cleanroom at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics
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Why The Globe Skimmer Dragonfly Holds The Crown For The Longest Flight In Nature
You picture a globe-trotting migrant and probably imagine an albatross, a humpback whale, or maybe a monarch butterfly. You probably do not picture an insect measuring barely an inch and a half. In
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Why South Australia Cave Bones Look Entirely Different Based On Light And Darkness
If you throw a bone into an underwater cave, the environment won't just keep it—it will write its life story directly onto the surface. Recent research published in PLOS One by Griffith University
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Why Vultures Eat Rotten Meat And Never Get Sick
Most animals would drop dead after eating a single bite of a decaying carcass rotting in the midday sun. Vultures do it for breakfast. They gorge on anthrax, botulism, and rabies-laced flesh without
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Why Mount Ararat And Its Shrinking Glaciers Matter For Human History
If you want to understand how ancient civilizations interacted with the environment long before written history, don't just look at dirt. Look at ice. High up on the frozen cap of Turkey's highest
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Why The Black Mamba Is Even Scarier Than People Realize
You can't outrun a black mamba. At roughly 12 to 15 miles per hour, this African serpent easily outpaces a human sprinter over short bursts. But fixating entirely on its velocity misses the real
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Why The 16000 Fossil Footprints In Bolivia Change Everything We Know About Dinosaurs
Bones lie still. Footprints tell the truth. If you want to know how a 66-million-year-old predator actually lived, stop looking at museum skeletons and look at the mud it left behind. Deep inside
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How A Few Inbred Snakes Took Over Guam And Surprised Scientists
Imagine stepping onto an island where a single square mile can hold up to 30,000 predatory snakes. That isn't a scene from a horror film. It's the reality of Guam, where a handful of brown tree