People can form extremely deep bonds with their pets, seeing them as loyal companions and family members. For this reason, when someone loses a pet, the experience can be as distressing as suffering the loss of a person.
A key factor that can aggravate pet grief is social isolation, so it’s…
The elusive ‘vampire squid from hell’ has just yielded the largest cephalopod genome ever sequenced, a monster clocking in at more than 11 billion base pairs – more than twice as large as the biggest squid genomes.
Hidden in its mix of A, T, G, and C was a deep evolutionary story. Despite…
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.
In May 2014, NASA announced at a press conference that a portion of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appeared to have reached a point of irreversible retreat. Glaciers flowing toward the sea at the periphery of the 2-kilometer-thick…
Game hunters have found startlingly ‘neon blue’ flesh inside of wild pigs in California, triggering advisory statements on potential contamination.
“I’m not talking about a little blue,” Dan Burton, owner of a wildlife control company, told Salvador Hernandez at The Los Angeles Times.
“I’m…
The Chernobyl exclusion zone may be off-limits to humans, but ever since the Unit Four reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded nearly 40 years ago, other forms of life have not only moved in but survived, adapted, and appeared to thrive.
Part of that may be the lack of…
Humans have probably shared their homes with dogs ever since they first settled. So it could be argued that there is no such thing as “human society” without including animals as part of it.
Our long shared history with dogs has even been described as a form of co-evolution.
And a new study my…
Astonishingly, earthquakes shake the US state of California around 10,000 times a year, on average – that’s about once every hour.
California’s official nickname is the Golden State, harking back to the mid-19th-century gold rush that saw its population explode in just four years, from…
Mankind has been trying to get back to the moon for…
Most of us have the odd bad dream. But if you’re regularly waking in a cold sweat, you might be wondering: is it just stress, or something more serious?
Some recent research has made headlines by linking frequent nightmares to an increased risk of dementia.
A 2022 study published in The Lancet…
