A citizen scientist discovered Maratus nemo in the wetlands of southern Australia. A newfound species of colorful, dancing peacock spider has an endearing orange face striped with white, leading the arachnologist who described the spider to name it “Nemo,” after Pixar’s famous clownfish. Unlike the plucky protagonist in the 2003 …
Even older than the Great Pyramids of Giza. A human-shaped wooden idol decorated with an eerie human face and considered the oldest of its kind ever discovered may date back even further in time, researchers now say. Often called the Shigir Idol after the Shigir peat bog, where it was …
It took a little help from the full moon to free the massive Ever Given cargo ship from its perch stranded in the Suez Canal. For nearly a week, the boat debacle took the internet by storm: a 1,300-foot-long (400 meters) container ship had gotten wedged into a key trading …
Symptoms of the mystery illness include memory loss and hallucinations. Officials in Canada are racing to find the cause of a mysterious brain disease that has afflicted more than 40 people in the New Brunswick province, according to news reports. Symptoms of the mystery illness resemble those of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease …
The top of the storm cloud reached the stratosphere. A severe thunderstorm cloud that formed over the Pacific Ocean in 2018 reached the coldest temperatures ever recorded, according to a new study. The very top of the storm cloud reached a bone-chilling minus 167.8 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 111 degrees Celsius), …
Heavy rains preceded the worms’ appearance. Spring rains often bring scores of earthworms to the surface, where they writhe on top of soil and sidewalks. But recently, heavy rainfall in a town near New York City was followed by something a little more unusual: a wormnado. A resident of Hoboken, …
These tiny creatures existed during the early Cambrian. The oldest known cephalopod — part of the group that includes octopuses, squid, cuttlefish and nautiluses — is more than half a billion years old, a new study suggests. The fossils date to the early Cambrian period and are about 522 million …
The behavior — which has been seen in sharks, turtles, seals and penguins — has yet to be explained. Marine animals are swimming in circles, and the scientists who discovered the strange behavior don’t know why. Researchers have now observed green sea turtles, tiger sharks, penguins and Antarctic fur seals …
Astronomers have searched the entire Milky Way to identify the safest places to live. It turns out, we’re in a pretty good spot. But if the past year has made you feel ready to relocate to another planet, you might want to look toward the center of the galaxy, according …
The extinct human lineage nicknamed “the hobbit” may not be a distant relative of modern humans as previously thought. Instead, hobbits may be members of the mysterious close relatives of modern humans known as Denisovans, and may have interbred with ancestors of modern humans on the islands of Southeast Asia, …
