While North America was captivated with Alaska’s Fat Bear Week (Chunk won, by the way), another playful animal competition was going down in New Zealand: The annual Bird of the Year contest, which aims to raise awareness for the country’s native bird species and the threats they face. Voting ran from Sept. 15-28, and this […]
Dig deep into your school days, and we’d bet there’s a moment there that significantly helped shape who you are today — and a teacher attached to it. Maybe it was your fourth grade teacher who spun such an entertaining story about a historical event that your passion for the subject was ignited. Or perhaps […]
We previously covered that gender equality may help increase longevity for both men and women — but while society continues making progress toward this systemic change, a new study has revealed how your individual personality could also impact your lifespan. Publishing their findings in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research, researchers searched for links between longevity […]
Currently listed as an endangered species on the IUCN Red List, Asian elephants have dwindled to a population of fewer than 40,000 — but England’s Chester Zoo just announced a major breakthrough in a world-first trial that could help boost that number. Elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus, or EEHV, can kill both wild and captive Asian and […]
Science’s coolest moments aren’t always visible to the naked eye, but the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s appropriately named Cool Science Image Contest is here to show them to us. Featuring objects and phenomena captured through microscopy, photography, animations, medical imaging, and other methods, the competition highlights the best scientific visuals to come out of research, scholarship, […]
It’s shaped like a turtle and swims like a turtle — but it’s actually a bionic robot. Evan Budz, a 15-year-old resident of Ontario, Canada, recently won a first-place prize in the European Union Contest for Young Scientists 2025 for his invention of an autonomous bionic sea turtle robot. The (adorable) device was developed to […]
Plenty of hip bakeries these days are leaning into heritage wheat flours and other ancient grain varieties, but it’d be hard to top the historic value of the flour being milled at the Holgate Windmill. Nestled in a suburb of York, England, the brick tower mill is the oldest working windmill of its kind in […]
A decadent chocolate cake drizzled with caramel, a pint of mint chocolate chip Haagen-Dazs, and a crisp can of Coke. No, we aren’t listing the items from someone’s last meal request, but you wouldn’t be surprised if we were, right? Humans love sugar — so much so that we add it to a huge array […]
The next time you have to hit the bank or post office, call a friend and make a date out of it: It’s good for you. That’s according to recent research linking happiness to companionship across over 80 different daily activities — from the mundane, like getting gas, to those that seem non-social by their […]
The Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards celebrate the beauty, intricacy, and interconnectedness of nature, and this year’s winning images are no exception. Announced Tuesday at a ceremony at the Natural History Museum, London, the 19 top shots were chosen from a record-breaking 60,636 entries from 113 countries and territories. Wim van den Heever from […]
At the Bannerghatta Bear Rescue Center on the outskirts of Bengaluru in southern India, a sloth bear with a penchant for peanut butter and honey recently made history. Vasikaran first arrived at the facility in 2019 with an injured paw that had to be amputated — but now, he’s the first known sloth bear in […]
A reality show of sorts recently took place in the depths of Guatemala’s Maya rainforest. There, a diverse cast of characters lived out some of their lives on camera, much to their viewers’ delight. But unlike the series you might find on Bravo, the viewers in this instance were scientists — and the cast was […]