6,745 results
- Animals
These award-winning photographs capture rarely seen wildlife and landscapes
Winners of the California Academy of Sciences’ annual photo contest dove deep underwater and hiked to great heights to create these striking images.
- Physics
CO2 from champagne bottles can form shock waves like those seen in rocket exhaust
Popping a bottle of bubbly releases a plume of dry ice that bears a visible type of shock wave called a Mach disk.
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- Animals
Giant pandas may have only recently switched to eating mostly bamboo
Giant pandas may have switched to an exclusive bamboo diet some 5,000 years ago, not 2 million years ago as previously thought.
- Animals
Hippo poop cycles silicon through the East African environment
By chowing down on grass and then excreting into rivers and lakes, hippos play a big role in transporting a nutrient crucial to the food web.
- Humans
Homo erectus arrived in Indonesia 300,000 years later than previously thought
The extinct, humanlike hominid likely reached the island of Java by around 1.3 million years ago, a study finds.
- Science & Society
‘A Polar Affair’ delves into a centurylong cover-up of penguin sex
In a new book, Lloyd Spencer Davis seeks to understand why an Antarctic explorer kept some of his penguin observations a secret.
- Animals
Pandas’ share of protein calories from bamboo rivals wolves’ from meat
The panda gut digests protein in bamboo so well that the animal’s nutritional profile for calories resembles a wolf’s.
- Humans
Fossils suggest tree-dwelling apes walked upright long before hominids did
A partial skeleton from an 11.6-million-year-old European ape still doesn’t answer how hominids adopted a two-legged gait.
- Space
How the second known interstellar visitor makes ‘Oumuamua seem even odder
With its gaseous halo and tail, the second discovered interstellar object, 2I/Borisov, looks basically like your run-of-the-mill solar system comet.
- Paleontology
Signs of red pigment were spotted in a fossil for the first time
For the first time, scientists have identified the chemical fingerprint of red pigment in a fossil.
- Paleontology
Science News’ favorite fossils of 2019
Fossil discoveries reported this year included Cambrian creatures, ancient bone cancer and a peek at life’s recovery after the dinosaur die-off.
