Science
709 articles
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Why Reconnecting Lake Erie Wetlands Smashed All Expectations
For decades, conservationists poured millions into fixing broken waterways with a heavy dose of optimism and very little hard data. You dig a channel, you knock down a concrete dike, and you cross
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Why Removing Just A Few Fish Saved A Dying Chinese Lake
You don't need to drain an entire lake or ban all human activity to fix a broken aquatic ecosystem. Sometimes, you just need to pull out a targeted fraction of the fish. For years, conservationists
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How A Retired Finance Worker Found A Brand New Animal Right In Her Own Backyard
You don't need a multi-million-dollar lab or a ticket to the Amazon rainforest to find a brand-new species. Sometimes, you just need a microscope, a bit of patience, and a piece of moss from a log
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What Happens When You Starve An Amazon Forest Of Rain
If you want to know what a dying tropical ecosystem looks like, look at a football pitch in the Caxiuanã National Forest of northern Brazil. For over two decades, researchers ran a brute-force
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Why This 324 Million Year Old Fossil Completely Changes How We Look At Insects
Most people think insects just crawled out of the muck one day, sprouted wings, and took over the planet in a neat, orderly fashion. That is completely wrong. Evolution doesn't work with neat
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Why Minnesota Poisoned Pickerel Lake To Fix An Out Of Control Carp Problem
You wouldn't think a single species of fish could completely hijack an entire ecosystem, but common carp do exactly that. For decades, Pickerel Lake in southern Minnesota was a murky, green soup
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Why The Artemis Ii Moon Crew Earned The Highest Honor In American Spaceflight
Send four people looping around the moon in a cramped capsule, and you better be ready to hand out some heavy hardware when they get back. That is basically what happened at Houston's Johnson Space
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The Real Physics Behind The Narwhal Tusk Twist Nobody Expected
You have probably seen pictures of the narwhal's legendary tusk. It looks like a giant unicorn horn jutting straight out of the animal's upper jaw, always spiraling to the left. For centuries, this
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Why Himalayan Glacial Collapses Are Catching Everyone Off Guard
When a wall of mud and water slammed into Nepal's Bhote Koshi River corridor, locals faced a sudden, terrifying wall of destruction. Entire bridges vanished. Water levels in the Trishuli River surged
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Why Tonight S Deep Partial Lunar Eclipse Looks Like A Blood Moon
You do not need an expensive telescope or a degree in astrophysics to enjoy the rare celestial show happening right now. Across the night sky of August 27 and 28, 2026, the Earth is sliding directly
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Why You Should Actually Care About This Week's 96 Percent Lunar Eclipse
You don't need a telescope, expensive gear, or an astronomy degree to enjoy the sky tonight. Grab a lawn chair, step outside, and look up because a staggering 96.3 percent of the full Moon is
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Why 14 Shark Teeth Found In The Egyptian Desert Change Everything We Know
You can walk across the baking dunes of Egypt’s Western Desert today and find nothing but dry sand and bone-dry heat. Yet, seventy million years ago, that exact ground sat beneath a warm, churning
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Why Everything We Thought We Knew About Ireland’s First Farmers Is Wrong
For over thirty years, a handful of bone fragments pulled from a windy bay in County Kerry sat at the absolute center of Irish archaeology. Discovered at Ferriter’s Cove on the Dingle Peninsula
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What Camera Footage From An Abandoned Mississippi Shed Actually Taught Us About Gray Ratsnakes
Walk past an abandoned outbuilding dripping with old snakeskins and most people run the other way. Researchers F. R. Hensley and C. I. Hensley did something smarter in central Mississippi. They set
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Why That Bright Orange Lichen On Rocks Might Be Worth Finding
You walk past mossy boulders every day without a second thought. But if you spot a patch of brilliant, fiery orange crust clinging to specific stones, you might be looking at a natural prospecting
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What Happens When You Plant Moon Trees After Fifty Years
Back in 1971, Stuart Roosa packed roughly 500 tree seeds into his personal kit and headed for the Moon aboard Apollo 14. He was the command module pilot, orbiting overhead while his crewmates walked
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Why Gamma Rays Are Weirder Than You Think
You stumble on a trivia question asking about a term that is both a Greek letter and a guy's name, and you instantly hit a mental wall. If you guessed gamma, you are halfway there. Most people stop
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Why Scientists Are Using Onlyfans To Save Marmots From Extinction
Science funding in America is broken. When researchers at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado started looking for ways to keep their multi-decade marmot study alive, they didn't just
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Why 29 Reindeer On A Remote Alaskan Island Ate Themselves Into Extinction
Biology offers few cautionary tales as stark as the St. Matthew Island reindeer experiment. Back in 1944, the United States Coast Guard dropped twenty-nine reindeer onto a remote, uninhabited sliver
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Why New Mexico Is Winning The Fight To Save The Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout
The Rio Grande cutthroat trout is tougher than you think. For years, people assumed this fish was headed for the history books, pushed out by invasive species and habitat loss. But they were wrong.
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Why Biological Control Is Often A Massive Mistake
We love the idea of a silver bullet. When we face an environmental problem—like an invasive plant strangling local ecosystems—we want a clean, simple fix. Someone suggests releasing a natural
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The Unintended Disaster Of Introducing Black Drongos To The Mariana Islands
In 1935, a decision made on the island of Rota looked like pure genius. Agriculture experts from the Japanese South Seas Development Company wanted to stop crop pests. They looked at the black drongo
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Why Ancient Avocados In Nicaragua Are Rewriting Human History
You grab a bag of Hass avocados at the grocery store without a second thought. They all look identical, taste identical, and stem from a fragile agricultural monoculture. But deep in the humid
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Why That Abandoned Arctic Fossil Is A Bigger Deal Than You Think
Science is rarely a clean, laboratory-controlled process. Sometimes, it's just a bunch of people standing on a frozen island in the middle of nowhere, staring at a giant, heavy rock, and realizing
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The Secret New Species Hiding In Plain Sight Inside New York City
You do not need to fly to a remote rainforest in Costa Rica to find uncharted biology. Sometimes, you just need a jar of ethanol and a patch of dirt in the middle of a concrete jungle. Biologists
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How Great White Sharks And Other Predators Are Changing Hurricane Forecasts
You've probably seen enough movies to think great white sharks only exist to terrorize beachgoers. Forget Hollywood. Off the U.S. East Coast, these apex predators are currently doing something
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What Beluga Whales Seeing Themselves In A Mirror Actually Proves
For decades, science suffered from a severe lack of imagination regarding animal minds. If a creature couldn't talk or use human tools, we assumed it walked through life in a cognitive fog. Then came
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Why The 2026 European Total Solar Eclipse Is Worth Every Bit Of The Hype
Skies across parts of Europe and the North Atlantic are getting ready for a rare shadow play. For the first time since 1999, mainland Europe is stepping directly into the path of a total solar
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Can You Actually See The Northern Lights During The August 12 Total Solar Eclipse
Total solar eclipses already stop traffic. Streetlights flick on. Birds panic. Temperatures drop. But imagine standing in the shadow of the moon while the night sky overhead dances with green and
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Stop Overthinking The Perseid Meteor Shower And Just Go Outside
You don't need a telescope, an expensive astronomy app, or a degree in astrophysics to catch the Perseid meteor shower. You just need a clear horizon, a lawn chair, and a bit of patience. Every
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Why Spain's Blood-red River Is The Best Clue We Have To Finding Life On Mars
You stand at the edge of a waterway that looks like liquid rust. For roughly 50 kilometers, Spain's Río Tinto flows in violent shades of crimson, orange, and deep burgundy. It looks like a CGI
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Why Alaska Just Grew A New Island And What It Means For The Arctic
A chunk of land the size of two square miles didn't just appear out of nowhere. It was hiding in plain sight, locked inside a frozen cage of ice until rising temperatures stripped the cover away.
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Why Tiny Dinosaurs Were Actually Squashed Out By Mammals
You picture a dinosaur and you likely think of a colossal sauropod shaking the earth or a ferocious theropod flashing massive teeth. We are obsessed with size when it comes to the Mesozoic era. Yet,
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What Your High School Biology Teacher Got Wrong About Snake Skeletons
For decades, most of us pictured snakes as living noodles. You look at a skeleton and see hundreds of identical little bones marching from skull to tail tip in a uniform row. It makes sense on the
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Why Global Warming Is Rewriting Where Butterflies Live Right Now
When a butterfly takes flight today, it isn't just looking for nectar. It's running for its life. Across the globe, rapid climate change and extreme weather are forcing insects to pack up and move.
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What Seungah Chung And 200 Ants Taught Us About How The World Finds Its Way
Most people watch ants march across a kitchen floor or a patch of dirt and think nothing of it. They are just tiny insects moving in a mindless line. Seungah Chung looked at that exact same scene and
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What Most People Get Wrong About China's New Carnivorous Mountain Flower
Charles Darwin spent a lot of time staring at sticky plant hairs. Back in 1875, he had a hunch that certain mountain flowers belonging to the genus Saxifraga were secretly eating insects. He lacked
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Why Cloning The Queen Of Sheba Orchid Changes Plant Conservation Forever
Rare plants face brutal extinction pressures every single day. Habitat loss and climate change tear through native ecosystems before botanists can even catalog what is disappearing. But science just
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Why Sticking Sea Sponges Into A Polluted Spanish Port Actually Worked
Marine biologists placed 42 sea sponges inside a toxic, heavily trafficked Spanish marina to see what would happen. 455 days later, the results challenged how we think about cleaning up our coastal
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Why Taiwan Lost Forest Hidden Giants Are Changing What We Know About Ancient Trees
Deep inside the mist-shrouded mountain ranges of Taiwan, a botanical time capsule survived decades of heavy logging and industrial expansion. While most of East Asia's lowland forests were cleared
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What Most People Get Wrong About Why Avocado Flowers Change Sex
You slice open a perfectly ripe avocado for toast, rarely thinking about the bizarre physiological drama required to grow it. Every single avocado flower changes its biological sex over a two-day
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Why Cutting Funding To Jodrell Bank Observatory Is A Massive Mistake
The UK government wants to save a meager two point eight million pounds a year by cutting funding to the Jodrell Bank Observatory. It’s a short-sighted financial choice that risks dismantling decades
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How Atomic Fingerprinting Stops Illegal Timber Smugglers In The Amazon
Paperwork is easy to fake in the timber trade. If you want to launder illegally harvested trees in the Amazon, you just forge a Forest Origin Document (DOF). For years, enforcement agencies struggled
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What A 100 Million Year Old Fossil Tells Us About Ancient Sea Monsters
You rarely get a clean crime scene in paleontology. Usually, millions of years of shifting tectonic plates, sub-surface currents, and decay turn prehistoric skeletons into a jumbled puzzle. But every
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Why Captive Elephants Can Actually Learn To Be Wild Again
You put an animal in a cage or a tourist camp for thirty years, and people assume its wild instincts are gone forever. They think it is broken beyond repair. But a five-year study published in PLOS
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How Pacific Ring Of Fire Eruptions Staged Centuries Of Global Cooling
We usually look at volcanoes as short-term disruptions. A mountain blows its top, grounds a few flights, drops global temperatures for a season or two, and then the planet bounces right back. But new
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Why Rescuing Polluted Marinas With Sea Sponges Actually Works
You throw trash into the ocean for decades, then act surprised when the water turns toxic. We have spent billions trying to scrub heavy metals and organic pollutants out of coastal marinas using
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Why Bbc Inside Science Got Science Communication Wrong
Science radio shows often miss the point. They treat breakthroughs like distant marvels meant to be watched from behind a glass wall. You hear a researcher talk for three minutes, a host makes a
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Why This 245 Million Year Old Chinese Fossil Changes Everything We Know About Ancient Sea Reptiles
Soft tissues usually rot away long before fossilization can work its magic. Bones survive, but guts vanish. That rule just got broken in spectacular fashion. Paleontologists working in southwestern
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Why This 385 Million Year Old Amber Find In China Changes Plant History Forever
Tree resin wasn't invented by the plants you think. A team of Chinese paleontologists just dug up the oldest confirmed amber on Earth, hidden deep inside a coal seam in Xinjiang. Clocking in at