Chickpeas May Become The First Food Ever Grown On The Moon
The Moon is not exactly famous for its lush growing conditions, but scientists at the University of Texas at Austin just took a meaningful step toward making lunar farming a reality. Researchers successfully grew and harvested chickpeas using simulated moon dirt for the very first time, a significant leap forward for NASA’s long-term plans to […]
Bumblebees Can Breathe Underwater?!
Most people assume bees are creatures of the air, zipping between flowers on warm sunny days, but scientists just discovered something that completely turns that picture on its head. Bumblebee queens, it turns out, can actually breathe underwater, and the whole finding began with a lab accident that nobody saw coming. A conservation biologist studying […]
The Smallest Dinosaur In South America Just Answered A 90 Million Year Question
Scientists have spent decades puzzling over one of the strangest groups of dinosaurs that ever walked the Earth, and a tiny fossil from the mountains of Argentina just handed them the answers they have been waiting for. Researchers from the University of Minnesota uncovered a nearly complete skeleton of a bird-like dinosaur called Alnashetri in […]
New Mars Discovery Has Scientists Stumped
For nearly two decades, scientists had been puzzled by some strange and unexpected signals coming from certain areas of Mars, and now they finally have an answer. Researchers from the SETI Institute and NASA combined laboratory experiments with data captured by orbiting spacecraft and identified what may be a completely new mineral hiding inside the […]
NASA’s Telescope Just Captured A Brain Like Nebula
Space has officially outdone itself. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has released stunning new images of a mysterious cosmic object nicknamed the “Exposed Cranium” nebula – a billowing cloud of gas and dust located some 5,000 light-years away that looks like a human brain floating inside a transparent skull. Officially known as Nebula PMR 1, […]
Raccoons Are Even Smarter Than We Thought
If you have ever watched a raccoon figure out your trash can, you already know these animals are impressively clever. But scientists at the University of British Columbia just discovered something even more fascinating: raccoons do not just solve problems to get food, they keep on solving them even after the food is already gone. […]
Bumblebees Make Decisions The Same Way You Do
Bumblebees visit hundreds of flowers every single day, which means they have to make hundreds of fast decisions in a row about exactly where to land next. Scientists have long wondered how a creature with such a tiny brain manages to do this so efficiently, and a new study from researchers in Germany has finally […]
Turns Out The T. Rex Moved Like A Giant Chicken
Everything you thought you knew about how a T. rex moved might be wrong, and it was a 21-year-old college student in Maine who figured it out. Adrian Boeye, a senior at the College of the Atlantic, took careful measurements of leg and foot bones from four well-preserved T. rex skeletons held in museums across […]
How Two Animals Invented The Same Defense Mechanism
A wasp and a frog have almost nothing in common, yet scientists just discovered that both creatures independently invented the exact same chemical weapon to protect themselves from predators. Researchers at the University of Queensland made the surprising find while studying how certain wasps and frogs produce a toxin that triggers intense pain in anything […]
Thousands Of Blue Glow In The Dark Snails Return Home
Thousands of tiny snails no bigger than a fingernail just made an extraordinary journey of more than 15,000 miles to return to their island homes in French Polynesia, and they arrived glowing. Before each snail was released into the wild, conservationists placed a small dot of UV reflective paint on its shell, causing the nocturnal […]