A Close Relative Fossils of the extinct hominid known as Australopithecus sediba were accidentally discovered by the 9-year-old son of a scientist in the remains of a cave in South Africa in 2008, findings detailed by researchers last year. The…
Update 2:50 pm EDT: Everything went as planned, with SpaceX and NASA reporting a successful splashdown. The astronauts radioed in from inside the capsule that they were feeling good. A recovery team has begun the process of extracting the crew…
You really don’t want to know where that beetle has been. Being swallowed alive by a frog is a death sentence for most insects, but one beetle species shrugs off being digested and instead finds freedom by sneaking out through…
Hunting dogs use more than their noses to find their way back to their owners hundreds or even thousands of feet away, researchers have found. Turns out, these four-legged navigators may sense Earth’s magnetic field and use it as a…
Similar to present-day diurnal birds of prey (right), the talons on the hind toe and the second toe of Primoptynx poliotauros (left) are noticeably larger than the talons on the third and fourth toe. In modern owls (center) all four…
A female anglerfish. Hey, pretty lady. When it comes to dating in the abyssal depths of the ocean, appearance doesn’t matter much. That’s fortunate for anglerfish, which resemble nightmarish fanged potatoes with a little reading lamp on top. And those…
For the first time ever, astronomers have directly imaged multiple planets orbiting a sunlike star. The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile photographed two giant planets circling TYC 8998-760-1, a very young analogue of our own sun…
In this episode of Life’s Little Mysteries, we’ll take a closer look at a mysterious process that has shaped life on Earth over hundreds of millions of years: evolution. What is evolution, how exactly does it work, and is it…
Researchers initially thought this skull belonged to a bird-like dinosaur. Now, evidence suggests that it’s the head of a lizard. A fossil attributed to a teensy, feathered dinosaur may not be a dinosaur at all, but rather a … lizard,…
The Australian bees of genus Tetragonula produce strange, spiral nests. Scientists think they know why. In a world of bland hexagonal honeycombs, a small group of rebellious Australian bees has chosen to build spiral staircases. Meet the bees of the…
The sturddlefish has a mix of genes from the Russian sturgeon and the American paddlefish. It shouldn’t have been possible, but it was: The birth of long-nosed, spiky-finned hybrids of Russian sturgeons and American paddlefish. Hungarian scientists announced in May…
An amazing comet that thrilled early-morning stargazers earlier this month is now visible in the evening sky, and it’s a sight you won’t want to miss. After all, this comet won’t be back for 6,800 years, NASA says. Comet NEOWISE…