When It Gets Hot, Animals Lose Their Minds
Hot days, angrier animals, scrambled bird brains and a fish that brawls with mirrors.
Earth Sciences
Liquid Iron at Earth's Core Changed Direction. Without It, Solar Winds Would Strip the Atmosphere.
The Earth's molten core pulled a U-turn beneath the Pacific in 2010. The reversal lasted a decade before weakening.
Hidden Traps in Antarctic Ice Shelves Supercharge Melting
The underside of Antarctica's ice shelves is riddled with hidden channels that are doing something the climate models didn't predict.
Trees Found Not Guilty of Arson in LA Fires
Post-fire crews cleared trees across Altadena for safety. Then researchers mapped how the fires actually moved. Wrong direction, wrong target.
A Sulfur Swap Turns Existing Plastic Biodegradable. One Step.
99 percent of plastic won't biodegrade. A one-step sulfur swap could change that for plastic already in circulation. There's a catch, but it's a small one.
Fire Ice Under Greenland Exploded. Polar Ice Sheets,Take Note.
The methane was gone from Greenland's seafloor sediments. Not reduced, gone. Fifty craters blown from below tell us this has happened before. What set it off?
Nuclear Blast Created Impossible Crystal Cage
The glass left behind by the first nuclear bomb is still yielding structures that shouldn't exist.
A Poet's Diary. Red Vapors Over Kyoto. Buried Timber. All Evidence of a Medieval Solar Storm.
A 13th-century Japanese poet recorded red skies lasting three nights. Scientists found the solar storm that caused it in 800-year-old wood.
Africa Files for Separation, Cites Irreconcilable Tectonic Differences
The crust under East Africa has been stretching thin for four million years. A new ocean is already in the works.
A Regular Cruise Stop at an Alaskan Fjord. Glacial Retreat Triggered a Landslide, Then a 1,580-Foot Wave.
A glacier retreated. A mountain lost its spine. A cruise ship left Tracy Arm fjord twelve hours before the second-highest tsunami run-up in recorded history stripped the walls to bare rock.
A Volcano Blew Up Half the Ocean Floor and Accidentally Cleaned the Sky
A stratospheric formaldehyde cloud tracked 10 days across the Pacific. It shouldn't have lasted more than hours. Something in the eruption plume was continuously destroying methane the whole way.
Something Miles Below the Ocean Is Making Oxygen. It's Not Alive.
Rocks on the pitch-black Pacific seafloor appear to be splitting water molecules into oxygen with no sunlight and no organisms.
A Tsunami That Wasn't Just a Flood. It Was a Moving Wall of Mud.
When a huge wave crosses soft farmland, it doesn't stay a wave for long. Japan felt that force as floodwaters ate the land.
In a Deep Ocean Trench, Creatures Dine on Sulfur
Eight kilometers down, the rocks say methane. The living organisms say sulfur. Life in the deepest ocean didn't get the memo (or didn't care).
Drought Concentrates Natural Antibiotics in Soil. Resistant Bacteria Are Taking Notes.
The dirt under us has been running antibiotic selection trials. A Caltech study across 116 countries traces real impact to resistance rates in hospitals.
The North Sea Is Hiding a Whole Country Beneath It
Ancient DNA pulled from North Sea sediments is rewriting what scientists thought they knew about Ice Age Europe — and filling in a conspicuous gap in human prehistory.
Earth Has a Gravity Hole Under Antarctica
The weakest point of Earth's gravitational pull sits beneath a frozen continent. The slow deepening of that anomaly may be what built the glaciers that regulate global climate.
Earth's Magnetic Shield Has a Dent That Just Got Half a Continent Bigger
Our planet's force field has a growing weak spot over the South Atlantic. Could it signal a pending magnetic pole reversal?